Saturday 12 March 2016

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T-Mobile mobile broadband image compression meddling revisited

If you're an idiot like me you may well be relying on T-Mobile to provide your internet access at home or on the move via their mobile broadband dongle. Since EE swallowed up T-Mobile and Orange, the new conglomerate seem to have forgotten that we actually exist and specific support is practically non-existent.



Eight years ago people began noticing that the quality of images viewed on the web via this service had been drastically degraded. It wasn't a one-off blip, but something that was being deliberately inflicted upon users by T-Mobile themselves in an effort to save bandwidth, and affected every image on every web site.

With a bit of research we discovered that T-Mobile provide an on/off toggle for this 'feature' at accelerator.t-mobile.co.uk and that worked for a while, despite resetting itself on a whim from time to time.

The problem went away for a good while, though just recently it appears T-Mobile are up to their old tricks again, only now the 'accelerator' is as dead as a dodo. We're told this is a bonus and we should be grateful since the upshot is faster browsing. This being T-Mobile of course, web browsing remains as slow as molasses, and we are hamstrung with grainy, 8-bit images by default.

An alternative way to coerce your browser to display images in their optimal resolution is to modify your browser's headers via an extension. The instructions for doing this with Firefox have been known for a long time, though until now I wasn't aware you could achieve the same results with Chrome, which is great news for me as this is my preference.

All you have to do is install the add-on, Modify Headers for Google Chrome, and follow exactly the same steps as provided by Ben Vallack.

This should tide me over nicely until I ditch these clowns and subscribe to a proper ISP.