Onspeed = 5x Faster Internet???

Will I or wont I, that is the question.

I discovered onspeed last week by
accident.Bacically here is the main points
of the service.

* Pay 40 euro for a year.

* They give you their software.

* Onspeeds servers compress your data.

* Software decompresses it on your PC.

* The Data compression can be up to 500%.

This means that if you have a 100k email of
pure text then onspeed would compress it down
to 20k and thus it would be 5 times faster.

Images are separate and the software allows you
to choose varying levels of compression for images
with resulting sacrifices on quality depending on
how aggressive you want the compression to be.

Catch?

Well The claim that they speed up your internet
connection by up to 5 times and in a way, yes,
they are correct.

But if you want to download large files ie
programs, movies, streaming, MP3's then onspeed
is no use.

They claim on their site that they are looking
into compression algorithms for MP3s and video
but I feel that they are entering into an
impossible situation in that arena for several
reasons.

1
How do they compress data which is already
compressed to extreme levels? ie it is very hard
to shrink MP3s or Movies to sizes smaller than
existing sizes.....

2
If they did begin to offer a video/audio
compression service, how could their servers
possibly cope with the enormous traffic generated?

Anyway

With there current service I think I will take the
plunge and go for the year subscription. I think
that the price is very good even if it only speeds
up general surfing and emails.