Editing Dial-up Internet access (section)

====Compression by the ISP====
{{Main|Web accelerator}}
As telephone-based Internet lost popularity by the mid-2000s, some Internet service providers such as TurboUSA, [[Netscape]], CdotFree, and [[NetZero]] started using data compression to increase the perceived speed. As an example, EarthLink advertises "surf the Web up to 7x faster" using a compression program on images, text/html, and SWF flash animations prior to transmission across the phone line.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.earthlink.net/dialup/|title=EarthLink Dial-Up Internet service – fast, reliable dialup access nationwide.|website=www.earthlink.net|access-date=2017-01-12}}</ref>

The pre-compression operates much more efficiently than the on-the-fly compression of V.44 modems. Typically, website text is compacted to 5%, thus increasing effective throughput to approximately 1000&nbsp;kbit/s, and JPEG/GIF/PNG images are lossy-compressed to 15–20%, increasing effective throughput up to 300&nbsp;kbit/s.

The drawback of this approach is a loss in quality, where the graphics acquire [[compression artifacts]] taking on a blurry or colorless appearance. However, the transfer speed is dramatically improved. If desired, the user may choose to view uncompressed images instead, but at a much slower load rate. Since streaming music and video are already compressed at the source, they are typically passed by the ISP unaltered.