[man8alexd]

In 1998, my hometown (>100K population) had an uplink of 2 bonded USR modems over a pair of dedicated phone lines to the regional capital about 100km away. This uplink fed two ISPs with 5 and 4 dial-up phone lines. The smaller one bought a DirecPC card to feed its dial-up clients and advertised it as "high-speed internet access".

[M95D]

At that time, without SSL, a caching proxy server would bring a huge speed improvement.

[man8alexd]

This is exactly what I did. Squid + WCCP saved about 20% of the traffic.