More website problems...

According to the federal statistics, broadband services are available to 85% of the households in the U.S. as of the end of 2001. Whereas 57% of the households in the U.S. have Internet access, only 10%-13% have broadband. Of the total U.S. households connected to the Internet, 20% have broadband and 80% have dialup.

Dialup connection speeds typically range between 19,000 and 52,000 Kilobits per second. To
translate that into actual performance, dialup connections will download data at between 1.5
Kilobytes (KB) and 5.0 KB per second. Broadband is defined as a downlink speed of at least 200,000 Kilobits (25 Kilobytes) per second. Most cable modem and DSL connections will download data between 25 KB and 120 KB per second.

The end result – many web designers have broadband Internet connections and do not properly
design their websites to accommodate dialup users.
Everything works great for the designer, their
Internet connection is 10-50 times faster than dialup.

The big culprits are graphics and images. It is not uncommon for a single page to have 10 – 30 or
more images on it. The pages may not seem graphical to the users since we have become accustomed to graphical pages.

Looking back to the download speeds of dialup connections we see they range from 1.5 K to 4.5 K per second. Taking a 3 K per second average and dividing it into 114 K we find that this single page will take
38 seconds to download over a dialup connection. The same page will take 2-4 seconds over a broadband connection.
Various studies show that Internet users will wait 7 – 10 seconds for a page to load, or at least for
evidence that the page is loading, before leaving the page. Dialup users may be a bit more patient, broadband users a bit less.
Read More...