One of the biggest frustrations with being out in the field with your laptop is having a slow cellular connection to the Internet. Even so-called "broadband" connections can keep you drumming your fingers and your prospects impatiently glaring. Well, thanks to a new service from the U.K. I just discovered, your days of waiting are over.

OnSpeed is a service that allows your dialup, cellular or WiFi Internet connection to act as if it were suddenly speeded up by several times over.  The reason it works so well and totally transparently in the background is thanks to a well-engineered combination of very fast OnSpeed "compression" servers and special software installed on your computer,  The following is a more detailed explanation that I pulled directly from the OnSpeed Website:

As you cannot physically change the speed of your Internet connection, ONSPEED uses a technology called Content Sensitive Compression ('CSC') to individually compress each element of a web page or email using various compression algorithms based on a patent approved proprietary technology. The end result is that your web pages and emails (PC only) load and download faster using your existing Internet connection.

When your web browser requests a web page, the ONSPEED software redirects that request to the ONSPEED compression servers. They take the respective web page content, compress it and send it back down to the ONSPEED software which decompresses it and sends it to the browser requesting the information.

ONSPEED offers a unique, patented technology called "Advanced Imaging", enabling you to receive fully viewable and instantly usable web pages, while maintaining the maximum quality of images. Advanced Imaging delivers all images on a page simultaneously. You continue to browse web pages while images are being progressively loaded. Image quality progressively improves until images have reached lossless quality.

ONSPEED’s dedicated algorithms compress the following elements:

• Text

• HTML objects

• Photo-realistic images (e.g. Compressed and uncompressed JPEG, PNG, Compressed and uncompressed GIF, and BMP)

• Line art and drawings (e.g. GIF, BMP)

• Animated objects (GIF)

• Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)

• Macromedia Flash

If a web page or email contains information that is not covered by a dedicated algorithm, ONSPEED will apply a generic compression algorithm to that data element.

In essence, with OnSpeed, most data traveling over the Internet is first compressed and sent using your Net connection, then  uncompressed to essentially its original form.  Thanks to very fast compression / de-compression technology, OnSpeed dramatically reduces the amount of data through your Internet connection thus creating the same perceived download speed as if your connection was many times faster.

For example, using my very slow cellular laptop connection, I brought up the Realtor.com Website.  Using OnSpeed, it came up over 11 times faster (see screenshot of OnSpeed performance statistics below)

The performance improvement is so dramatic that I now rarely use a hotel's Internet connection when I'm traveling (unless it's free --which it typically isn't).

This means that no matter where you are, whether in the living room of your prospective seller, or in the car with a new buyer, you can now use just a cellular connection and still see very reasonable speeds.  And for only $49.99 / year it will pay for itself very quickly.

No more drumming of the fingers, pregnant pauses or glaring looks —now that's a real improvement!