Posts tagged download speeds

13th November 2007

Low bandwidth? Try the mobile version of the website

I was having coffee with a friend today who does work with people in countries where internet speeds are down at dial-up rates of 28.8kbps on a good day and where it is rare for workers to have their own internet connection in the office let alone at home.

I mentioned the recent post I’d written about myspace pages taking 5 minutes to load in India and Brazil.

It struck me that it would make sense for people with such low speed connections to the internet to use the mobile versions of the websites instead.

Another advantage of the mobile versions of these sites is that they cut out a lot of the clutter that you see on the normal pages because they’ve been pared down for faster download speeds for mobile devices.

Try these out for size:

The following appear to intercept my browser request, notice I’m not on a mobile, and serve me the standard versions. Maybe there’s a way round this.

7th November 2007

Social networking - worth the wait?

Two things struck me when reading this article about Google’s Orkut being bigger than Facebook in India and Brazil.

First, that people are prepared to wait up to five minutes for a page to load.

Orkut - 1.5 minutes
Facebook - 2.5 minutes
Myspace - 5 minutes

You can quickly see why Orkut is favoured over the others.

Those of us with broadband connections to the internet quickly forget how lucky we are - I get frustrated if a site takes longer than two seconds or so to load on my screen.

Second, that through a mixutre of poor product management and complacency, the Internet is awash with bloatware - i.e. inefficient and badly architected software - which takes longer to download, clogs up the Internet and, in the long run, will hamper the companies creating it.