To anyone stuck in 28.8 land, I would recommend that you try www.propel.com first before sinking a ton of money into Sat Internet (either *band or Dway) or trying to implement multi-linking.
I was a *band customer for almost 3 years until my 360 modem failed in September. *band wanted $100 to replace it but required me to sign a 1 year service extension. But with Comcast cable modem service due to be activated before the end of the year, I bailed and went back to dial-up.
But surfing the net at 28.8 was once again agonizingly slow. After a lot of research I decided to give Propel a try because it's the same system that they license to Earthlink for their dial-up acceleration but works with any ISP. It's $8/mo with no annual commitment.
Basically it configures your browser to use Propel's proxy servers and it gets it's acceleration by downrezing all the graphical images. I found that the default setting gave me a 2 to 3 times performance improvement without sacrificing much on image quality. Since a lot of these images are advertisements anyway, who cares. It also includes built in add and pop-up blockers that are fairly effective, though not perfect
So I used the service for about 6 weeks until Comcast installed my cable modem. It pretty much works as advertised but to get the 5x acceleration the graphics get downrezed to a point of being distracting, so the default setting seems about the best compromise. Propel won't really do much for downloading large files, but for surfing via dial-up it's great and worth the money.
Give it a try, you've got nothing to lose at $8/mo. When the cable modem was installed, I canceled the service without a hassle and un-installed the software with Add/Remove Software with no problems.
For the record, I'm not affiliated in any way with Propel.
