Web Image Compression Out of Control

[Ruin]

Strange thing...

Here in the ol' sandbox I run the internet through a cellphone. Not the greatest, but it works.

Usually, it's plain old, nice, happy internet. Everything looks like it should and it functions fine - albeit slow.

About a week ago, magically and out of the blue, with no help from me (that I know of) FF and IE started making my images look like crap. Not all images, mainly pictures and thumbnails. The look like they've been seriously compressed and the quality is VERY poor. This is frustrating because looking at pictures helps me feel a bit closer to home... anyway... I'd really like to get back to seeing high quality pictures again through any browser.

Any idea what caused this or how to fix it?

Thanks!

[Rocky]

Good luck with fixing that one, I've given up.

Same issue here.

[dporter]

When I was on dial up there was an option on the internet service that I was using to downgrade image quality on firefox (or whatever browser you're using) to help speed up load times. I was using Net Zero at the time. I didn't like the downgrade in image quality so I shut that option off (it was defaulted as on).

I would look in the settings of the actual ISP your using instead of firefox to help solve the problem.

I'm not sure if that will help you in any way since it just kind of changed on it's own.

[Ruin]

Rocky,

Yeah, same crap for me. Hmmn

dporter,

I'm just running a phone as a modem. No software or anything, just drivers to dial out. It's pretty frustrating.

I'll keep digging. Hopefully someone can help me solve this one though.

[Buehgler_AS]

My guess is that the phone company is silently "improving" your browsing experience by down-sampling the images for you in order to speed up your browsing experience -- oh and that saves them their precious bandwidth as well. They are probably only doing this to embedded images that you are receiving via http, so as to not completely frustrate you.

You might be able to "solve" it by finding a proxy service that will give you an encrypted proxy -- for example using something like this overpriced solution http://www.anonymizer.com/consumer/product...tal_net_shield/ -- that way your phone company can not see/change any of your http traffic. You might want to try https://www.snoopblocker.com/ they provide a free/ad-supported encrypted service that may well be a bit clunky/slow but might help.

Best of luck.

Edited August 20, 2009 by Buehgler_AS

[Ruin]

Thanks Buehgler. I'll check with my guys later today and see if anyone else is experiencing the same thing. That was my biggest fear because I simply can't control it. I'll let you know what I find out later.

[firefly2442]

Yeah, I'm guessing it's the ISP since both IE and FF are doing it. Then at least you know it's probably not a software issue. If you go into the network connections page in the control panel, is there anything you had to setup in order to get it working? Perhaps there's a compression option in the properties/settings? Dunno, I've never used a cellphone for internet service.

[Ruin]

It seems some guys in my platoon are having the same problem, and most aren't. We all use the same method of logging on... so I'm not sure how it could be the ISP if it seems to be a mix?

The only possible thing it could be... I'm on a data plan through this company (itisaluna), so I pay $0.003/min whereas some guys aren't and they just pay per minute ($0.03/min). I wonder if the data plan would cause it to do that?

I hope this is something I can fix on my end, it's really irritating.

[Ruin]

So I moved to a less ghetto part of my already ghetto FOB...

I'm able to pick up a wireless network instead of using the cell phone.

Problem solved. It was the ISP.

Now I'm viewing pages in High Def! Haha, good to go.

Rocky... you might want to get on the phone with your ISP and demand "######?"