Steve,

        As an @home.com cable internet customer I find that for me a firewall (Zone
Alarm) does not slow me down while most of the proxies I use do slow me
down.  In fact, some of the proxies do not allow images through and/or
restrict access to areas within their domain only.

        As far as @home.com using a proxy/firewall, all I know is that when I check
to see what websites are listing as my IP address (when surfing without my
proxies) it comes up with ME.  (You can go to a couple of sites to check
whether or not they see you: http://www.nic.mil and
http://kid.pagecount.com/kid/tellip/.)  So I would have to say that whatever
proxy they may be using, it is not providing me (and you, probably) any
level of anonymity.

        By the way, I use a couple of different websites that are rather large and
I compare download speeds (after clearing the cache) between proxies and no
proxies (http://www.rense.com/ and http://www.apfn.org/apfn/apfncont.htm).
Also, there are a number of sites for testing your speed.  Try
http://209.61.187.19/speedtest/index.html and http://www.testmyspeed.com/.

        Hth.

        Brian Sanburn

<<< you wrote... >>>

   The recent talk about Firewalls in general and Zone Alarm specifically
makes me wonder... Does installing a firewall
on a cable modem affect the performance while browsing, downloading files,
etc.?  If so, is it noticeable?

        Also, my ISP (Home.com) uses a proxy/firewall on their network, according
to their techs, and therefore a personal firewall isn't necessary.  Anyone
believe this statement?

Thanks,

Steve Snyder
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