>Can this possibly buy me anything if I don't have a NetBSD system on
>the other end of a connection?

Sure, if the other end supports BSD compression.  This is not unheard of -
you'll note that the last person who asked about it was trying to get BSD
compression working from an SGI system to his NetBSD box.  A quick
check on one of our SGI systems shows that the IRIX ppp implementation
does indeed support BSD compression.

--Ken