Back in the day, when 48kbps was scorching fast, we all needed a way to get our internets faster. I remember many a (un)happy hour fiddling about with various “internet accelerators”, caching proxies, and other bits’n'bobs.

It all came rapidly back to me this week as I tried out ‘mobile broadband’, via a Three USB modem. It’s exactly like dial-up, but faster!

It does sometimes drop the connection (especially during thunderstorms), and doesn’t seem anywhere near as reliable as a wired connection. But it’s still pretty impressive. Look ma, it’s tha intertubes with no wires!

So, in an effort to get a little more stability and speed from the dongle, I started looking at the web accelerators and proxies available today. AllegroSurf is still around – I remember that from when Win2K was in beta! Still looks the same, is still a solid app, still costs money. Well that rules that one out then! It does have useful features though – ad blocking and caching being amongst them.

The Google Web Accelerator was a bit of a no-go. It didn’t like my install of Firefox 3. Too bad – I do.

I half remembered something called “webalizer” or something like that – it had an interface a bit like Avast Antivirus, and did caching and prefetching – but it doesn’t seem to exist any more! Perhaps I’ve completely mis-remembered the name.

Best thing so far is a little Java app from toonel.net – it compresses data to and from toonel’s own web based proxy server. I’m averaging 40% compression both ways – sweet! Saves on the 5gb bandwidth allowance, and speeds up downloading too.

But still, does anyone know what happened to this ‘webalizer’ thing – or even what it was actually called?