Enable the EarthLink dialup Accelerator over AirPort

Jan 29, '04 09:46:00AM

Contributed by: allenhuffman

I guess I was asleep and did not notice that EarthLink now has their EarthLink Accelerator released for Mac OS X. The Accelerator works by having the EarthLink servers grab web pages first and compress text and (optionally) reduce graphics size before sending them to your computer. This, along with caching techniques, can dramatically speed up dialup browsing.

However, if you are using an AirPort base station which dials into the 'net for you, the default settings do not work. I went back and forth with EarthLink "support" with no success -- they didn't even seem to understand/acknowledge what I was trying to do.

Apple Support forums to the rescue! I found someone looking for the answer to a different question, and he casually mentioned something that is probably documented better on the PC side. Accelerator works as a proxy on localhost (127.0.0.1 port 8080). So, install Accelerator on your machine, then set its network HTTP proxy to 127.0.0.1:8080, and you are set.

Currently, I cannot get multiple machines to work -- this may be an intentional limitation that EarthLink has designed into it, though. Anyone got further?

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