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Well I'm sure there are plenty who will jump at the chance to spend their hard-earned cash on getting one of these free broadband connections but those with half a brain won't.

And yes, that's right, despite what they claim, it's not free at all.

A new scam has shown up on the Net and it goes under the name of Juice.

The claims made for this service are beyond belief, just check out this website and see for yourself.

Gosh, with all those flashing animate4d "FREE" signs, it must be legit -- right?

Well it appears as if the website has been *very* carefully worded -- worded in a way that they could probably back up their claims in court if they had to.

My instincts tell me that this is an MLM or ponzi (pyramid) scheme in which the "commodity" being traded is a simple piece of acceleration software such as that already offered by a number of local ISPs.

This software has the potential to increase the speed of an internet connection by compressing webpages and reducing the size (and quality) of graphic images before they're sent to your browser -- where a matching piece of software decompresses the data back to its original form.

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Yes, these systems, when properly designed and configured, can offer effectively higher transfer rates, particularly over dial-up connections.

Now, the people behind Juice have cleverly implied (but not actually stated) that you'll be able to get 2mbps over a regular dial-up connection.

If you read very carefully, they actually say that you'll get four times the speed of regular broadband -- albeit they don't say that this is the case with dial-up. If you were to run this software over an existing broadband connection (which means 512Kbps everywhere but NZ where we have 256Kbps -- Telecom's version of broadband), then you could potentially achieve a 4:1 compression on raw HTML.

So how are they going to provide this service without involving your ISP?

Simple, they'll set up a proxy server carrying the compression software and the software you run on your PC will route all your browsing requests through that server.

But is it free?

Well I'd wager that it's ad-supported and that one of the terms of use is that you allow Juice's marketing partners to contact you by email with their product pitches (ie: spam you).

I notice that the official Juice website "has been temporarily suspended" (which is why I linked to the UK one). I wonder why that is?

Maybe this is a genuine attempt to provide data compression for web-surfers -- after all, there are other suppliers of such services already. Indeed, there are a lot of similarities between Juice and OnSpeed -- except that the claims made by Juice are so inflated and cleverly misrepresented that it smells like a scam.

What's worse, it has already hit New Zealand and the appearance of those words "GET PAID HUGE COMMISSIONS AND OVERRIDES" only increases the odour of scam.

So is Juice one of those very rare genuine "free lunches" that surface occasionally on the Net?

If you answered "yes" to that question then go to the back of the class.

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