Polka is offering Polka Accelerator, a software program which it says will allow dial-up customers to send and receive e-mails at up to three times the speed of its regular dial-up offering.
"This means the amount of time you spend waiting for Web pages to download will be shorter, so your dial-up cost could well be less," the company says in a media statement.
Polka's Accelerator is available to subscribers at an extra R4 per month, it says. The company offers its regular dial-up Internet service at R75 per month.
However, MyADSL founder Rudolph Muller is unimpressed. He says an accelerator is nothing new in the market and is already available from other providers, including Telkom and MWeb.
Muller also notes that a complaint was lodged with the Advertising Standards Authority of SA in July 2005 over Telkom's claim that an accelerator can make dial-up Internet speed six times faster. Research by Veritest proved this claim to be untrue, he adds.
Accelerators work by compressing the content, and frequently used content is cached on the Internet service provider's server to eliminate the need to access these sites from overseas servers, he says.
This speeds up the serving of these Web sites to consumers and cuts down on unnecessarily wasting international bandwidth, Muller adds.
He says some accelerators may also filter out unnecessary content, like banner ads, which further limit a Web site's speed.
Muller adds that e-mails and Web pages are some types of content that may benefit from accelerators. "When downloading already compressed files, like large zip files, users will generally not see much of an improvement in speed," he says.
Polka subscribers can download and install the Polka Accelerator online.
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