Determining Client Connection Speed (Broadband vs Dial Up)

How?

[woop01]

We'd like to be able to determine if a user is on broadband or dial up for a small flash file that will be shown on one of our pages (similar to ESPN, CNN, etc).

I know there's a $500+ popular program that does this quite easily but is there an easy way to do this ourselves?

[mrMister]

I believe those packages use IP addresses to detect the network speed. They maintain a list of all the major broadband providers' IP ranges and can determine the connection speed from that. You could do that yourself, but It'd take a lot of time researching the data, and you'd need to keep maintaining it.

Another solution would be to implement a speed test. Perhaps using AJAX. Record the current system time, then make an AJAX HTTPRequest that retreives some arbitary data (say about 10KB). Then record the time after the data has been retreived and subtract the latter time from the earlier time.

A modem will retreive that data in 2 seconds or longer), a broadband connection will retreive the data in half a second or under.

Of course, the best way would be to ask the user if they want to view the highe bandwidth version or not. You shouldn't assume that just because a user has a high speed connection that they want to use Flash.

I have a 10Mbps connection, but I block all flash and given the choice, I'll always open up the HTML version. Chances are if I'm presented with a flash site and have not been told there's a HTML version, I'll close down the browser window.

[woop01]

Thanks, we're not presenting the site in flash, just a ten second small video that is directly related to the site content. The best way to describe it would be the way ESPN adds news to their site.