Are there any major speed benefits to setting up a caching server such as Squid, on a home gateway, or will the browser cache suffice?

What are some methods or software to help increase internet speed (other than upgrading plan through ISP)?

Using an http caching proxy would deliver the following benefits (over a browser cache):

• Most likely a much larger cache; you could set this to several GB instead of e.g. 50MB.
• Everyone going through the caching proxy could read pre-cached files. (Web browser cache is per machine.)

That just the obvious stuff. You can tweak and fine tune all sorts of options and behaviors when going through a proxy.

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The web browser cache is per user, per browser, which is only the same as per machine if all of the users have a machine each and use one browser each. If either of the other cdonditions is true, there can be a benefit. Maybe not a big benefit...

I wouldn't say so, in most use cases. A minor benefit, maybe, but not a major one. There is probably a clearer benefit for reducing the data usage requirements, which is a benefit, but, again, not a major one.

If your isps nameservers are on the slow side (and many 'bargain basement' isps do seem to want to minimise their spend on this) there is probably a bigger improvement in the perceived experience (which may, or may not be, directly related to speed, depending on which speed you mean) by caching dns look-ups. This would be particularly advised if you were using, eg, squid, as squid does a lot of look ups.

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