How is the “up to 5x faster than dial-up” claim regarding the Web Accelerator quantified?

Answer by: Frederique Taillefer, Aplus.Net Knowledge Base Support.

Web page performance is measured by the amount of time it takes to download an entire Web page into your browser. So, when comparing the performance improvement delivered by the Web Accelerator with an unaccelerated Internet connection, two identical computers are configured. Both are connected to the Internet at the same dial-up connection speed and both have the same PC and Internet browser configuration. Using an automated browsing measurement tool (i.e. a surfing “bot”), both computers visit the same Web pages multiple times. In order to eliminate variations in download speed caused by various network factors, the average times for downloading the same page with and without the Web Accelerator are measured and compared in order to determine the improvement factor for a specific Web page. 5x represents the high-end of the frequently measured averaged results.

If you are particularly interested in the topic of timing Web pages, here is a link to a site that provides a stopwatch: http://www.numion.com/Stopwatch/index.html.