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What is often advertised as "high-speed dial-up Internet" or "accelerated dial-up" by service providers such as Earthlink, People PC, NetZero in the United States and Gonuts4free in Spain, is a form of dial-up access that uses the newer modem standard V.92 to shorten the log-on (or handshake) process, and then once a connection has been established the provider will selectively compress, filter, and cache data being sent to the user with the overall effect of increasing the speed of browsing most standard web pages (see also proxy server).
The term high speed is misleading as these processes do not increase the overall throughput of the line, only making more efficient use of the bandwidth that is already there. Certain applications cannot be accelerated, such as HTTPS, streaming media, or file transfers. The compression of certain files such as pictures can have a negative effect on the browsing experience of the user, due to the lower quality that it imposes. However, the user can manually choose to view the images in true quality whenever he or she chooses to do so.
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