What speed are people surfing at these days?

Can't find the stats anywhere-help

[brizad]

You would think this would be easy to find but I have searched webmaster world and the net for an hour and can't find it.
Any ideas as to what percentage are using 33k, 56k, broadband?

[netguy]

Hope this helps...
[apts.org...]

Steve

[bcolflesh]

In my opinion, in the US, 56k is going to stay well over 50% for many years to come - we just don't have the modern line infrastructure that many other small nations do - even Iraq has (or did have... ) a state-of-art country-wide optical network installed by the Chinese.

Regards,
Brent

[jimbeetle]

Brent,

I would have agreed with you but article cited by netguy has link to other article citing broadband 50% mark was hit January 2002.

Of course, you have to be careful about numbers. The 51% cited was "number of hours surfed" using broadband as opposed to 56K and below. Looks like penetration was at 21% of homes and 63% of offices (if I'm reading the dang things correctly), and the data is a year outdated.

<quibble>Wonder if "number of hours surfed" is actual surfing or "just being connected". Can they tell the difference?</quibble>

It might go a bit more quickly than expected.

Jim

[bcolflesh]

I saw those stats in the link, but I doubt them - there is no way they include the enormous number of local/rural ISPs that cover the majority of the US.

Maybe major adoption of powerline based internet connectivity would change all this though

www.globetechnology.com/servlet/ArticleNews/tech/RTGAM/20030116/gtpower/Technology/techBN/

But I think US power companies are too slow/stupid to make the huge fortune on this that they could.

Regards,
Brent

[cfx211]

I think that US broadband adoption is approaching the 30% or greater mark. That would be 30% or more of homes with the internet are on broadband. % wise, most of the US population lives tightly clustered around metro areas.

[brizad]

Thanks for the response netguy. The data is from 2001 and I assume that broadband has increased since then but I can't find any recent data.

I have found this: "According to an AC Nielsen and Arbitron study. Only 1/3 of internet users have access to high speed internet. Of those, 64% have it at work and 37% at home. Two-thirds of internet users are still on dial up."

I think the key word here is "ACCESS." When you are at work you have "access" but you probably aren't surfing the net, you should be working.

This may be the best data there is but I would like to know what percentage of people actually surf, shop, etc. with broadband vs dialup.

The real question is, how large should our pages be, and how fast they are rendered on a client's site. I think that we should optimize our site for the 56k surfer, but my boss thinks that the vast majority of people use broadband so he doesn't care how big our pages get. I think that big pages cost us business so I am just looking for some data to back this up.

[brizad]

The real question is, how large should our pages be, and how fast they are rendered on a client's site

OOOPS Didn't mean clients site I meant a clients computer.

[bcolflesh]

"...but my boss thinks that the vast majority of people use broadband so he doesn't care how big our pages get."

Yeah, a lot of bosses make this erroneous assumption!

;)

Regards,
Brent

[jimbeetle]

brizad, I think the answer to your question is in your last post. Well, kind of.

The real question is, how large should our pages be, and how fast they are rendered on a client's computer

Who are your clients or customers? Is this a large B2B site? Assume some sort of broadband connection. Do you sell directly to consumers? Assume dialup.

You know who your target market is. Make your site for them. (Though if you do design for 56K everyone will be happy -- except maybe your boss.)

Jim

[netguy]

brizad... depending on your industry, if you can get by with a 'lighter load' (as jimbeetle said) then go for it.

In my case, I have several sites that are clearly on the 'heavy' side, with lots of nested tables, several compressed graphics, and a ton of news links.

If you have to go with larger pages, what I do is:

#1 Hand-code the html (saves a TON of extemporaneous code that is added by 'auto editing' software)

#2 Reduce gifs to (est) 30 colors, and JPGs to no more than 65% compression.

#3 Break your tables apart (small at top). I have a small table at the top that has the headers and basic navigation links, then close the table </table>... then start a new one. This allows people to immediately see the top while the rest is loading. (1 huge table will make them wait, wait, wait!)

#4 Make sure you have a good server/connection. Before we bought our own servers, we were depending on our host company, and how many 'hundred' other sites were residing on the same server, and if they were tied to a T-1 line... This can even slow down a small page! Now we have our own servers with an OC-3 connection and don't have to worry about others stepping on us.

Whatever the design, there's always a way to maximize it for your visitors.

Good Luck!

Steve

[brizad]

Thanks for the tips!
netguy you make some good points.
Our current site is hand coded but we have a new designer working on our "new and improved" site. He is using some really cool programs and I can see the bloat coming. Yesterday in our meeting he showed us the great looking page. He was proud to tell us that the header and footer graphics were "only 20k each" and the side bar graphic is 5k. We are up to 45k already WITHOUT ANY CONTENT! This could be scary!

We are trying to walk the style vs usability tightrope. The preliminary site looks great but it IS bloated. I am sure that we can slim it down.

I read in a usability study about people's perceptions on how quickly a page renders. The conclusion was that (within reason)if a person finds what they are looking for on a site then they generally percieve it a fast. If they don't find what they want then they say it is slow. You can do the things like separate the tables (which helps of course) to make the page load faster, but it did not significantly change their actual perception of the page.

We are getting a faster server too so this should help a little.

jimbeetle said:Who are your clients or customers? Is this a large B2B site? Assume some sort of broadband connection. Do you sell directly to consumers? Assume dialup.

I think that is correct. We are B2C but we seem to have 50% access us from work and 50% from home. Gotta go with the 50k page like you said.

Now just gotta convince the boss. It's tough when you are smarter than the boss isn't it? ;)

[netguy]

brizad... I've got everything from terrorist news - to tabloid news, to design sites... and as long as you provide the content, people are going to love you!

Just try to still provide it as efficiently as possible. ;)

Steve

[Visit Thailand]

In Asia many people have brodband especially in HK or Singapore but the majority of people will still be using 56K.

We design all sites for 26/56K modems and if they have broadband then it should just be super fast.