EarthLink big plan to make dial-up faster: Use mobile sites
![larry-dignan-eic.jpg](https://www.zdnet.com/a/img/resize/ad5eaccb545ef683588243a9891d5f678df042df/2017/04/26/eb462fe7-e39e-43ba-abbd-c4ca2442306e/larry-dignan-eic.jpg?auto=webp&fit=crop&frame=1&height=192&width=192)
EarthLink is using a novel way to boost dial-up access speeds---use mobile versions of Web sites.
The company's announcement that it could dramatically boost dial-up speeds sounded interesting. After all EarthLink said that it could "speed of the online experience for dial-up Internet access users by up to 80%."
EarthLink notes that mobile versions of popular Web sites give you an 81 percent speed boost over a 53.2 kbps dial-up connection.
The company says:
Using the EarthLink Toolbar to identify faster sites can reduce page load times in certain instances from 4 minutes to less than 30 seconds, as some faster sites loaded as quickly as 10 seconds over a dial-up connection.
Now the natural inclination for folks is to laugh at EarthLink's focus on dial-up speeds, but the company has more than 1 million subscribers. In addition, there are 10 million to 12 million people that still use dial-up access. AOL and EarthLink consider these folks a nice recurring revenue stream.
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