Practicalmadness

I've been seeing a lot of TV commercials for Juno, the K-Mart to AOL's Wal-Mart, advertising a service they're calling SpeedBand. The implication is that for $14.95, you can have high-speed internet just like all us clowns who are paying $30 or more every month for cable/DSL lines.

This all sounds very compelling. However, just as the commercial and the Juno SpeedBand logo fade to black, a quick-eyed viewer may happen to notice this little disclaimer:

Does not increase transmission speed of files or attachments.

Hmm. That's interesting. So you say it's faster, and yet it does not download files or attachments any faster than regular dial-up? We must research this, and research this I have. To answer this question, I clicked on a link titled "How does SpeedBand work?"

SpeedBand is dial-up internet, pure and simple. Juno is able to speed up web page downloads by using a "proprietary technology" which sounds suspiciously like a proxy server that downloads the page, zips it and sends it down the dialup line. On your end, a proprietary SpeedBand client unzips the page and makes it look pretty.

Of course, if the SpeedBand client goes awry, you're back in the stone age. Sure, web pages load slightly faster, but in return you're back to busy signals, dropped connections and not being able to use your phone. Meanwhile, downloading a new version of your web browser, or any other software, will still take ages. And streaming video? Fuhgeddaboutit.

This would not bother me so much if Juno's happy, happy, happy commercials didn't try to present this service as being anything like real broadband. Having had a full-time, super-speedy internet connection at home for two or three years makes me wonder how anyone can still live with dialup.

In closing, let me address the designers of Juno's web site. I know you were trying to be helpful by detecting the platform I'm using and showing me only information tailored to the Mac OS X version of Juno. But when I click on a link that says "What is Juno SpeedBand?", "Juno SpeedBand is currently only available for Windows computers" is not an acceptable answer. That is not the question I asked.