How to determine customers connection rate

Looking for suggestions on how to accomplish this...

Our web site has a significant amount of Flash content on the home page (not my idea) and as a result is geared toward dsl/cable modem users but we don't really want to leave out dial up customers. It currently takes way too long for our home page to load and display at 56K and so I want to try to determine a way to redirect slower dial up customers to a non-Flash home page yet still use the existing Flash home page for faster connection customers. Does anyone have any suggestions regarding how I can reliably determine the connection rate of a customer then quickly perform this redirect?

TIA,
Jeff

To answer my own question I actually found some really simple yet slick Bandwidth Detection javascript code to do this here.

I will probably integrate this as a Zencart contrib soon if anyone is interested, let me know?

Thanks,
Jeff

Its interesting. I'm not sure how reliable it would be... and you risk your customers (especitally your high-speed ones) seeing a different site at different visits, depending if something has a momentary hic-up or not.

I reloaded that test page three times, and on the 3rd time I got the low-speed page, even though I'm on a 10Mb dedicated line here. Why? I dunno... some router somewhere between me and him had a delay. I reloaded it 10 times since and got the highspeed every time. Is it a big deal? Nahh, probably not.

A safer bet though, is to either give your customers a choice (because frankly, even high speed users hate flash intros) or just ditch the flash. Far too often, flash is used as an unnecessary, and unwanted waste of time to the visitor. Long gone should be the days that we see a "click here to enter" page and usually a flash intro is just a fancy "click here to enter". If you had a store front, would you have a customer walk through your door and THEN have to press a button to continue inside? Or view a movie before they are able to shop?

Ok, I konw you weren't looking for design advice :) And obviously I'm making presumptions that may not apply.

Thanks for sharing the find!

• Steven

Hi Steven,

Yeah, I agree on elimination of Flash enirely, unfortunately they want the Flash stuff so I'm left with coming up with an alternate way. :(

I've actually hacked our test site at http://xas.speedcoshooting.com:8888/ (login: speedy pw: speedco) and implemented the above proposed methodology. You are welcome to try it if you like.

While the hack is a bit dirty yet, it does seem to work. I substituted the Bandwidth Detection code for the index page and then redirect to the actual index page renamed index_hi for hi bandwidth and just as a test to the contact_us page for lo bandwidth users.

You might try it from where you're at and let me know if you are ever able to get the lo bandwith (contact_us) page over a high bandwidth connection as you suggest the test code did?

Not saying I will ever use this but I'd like to hear results both ways if anyone with a modem also, would like to give it a try?

Thanks,
Jeff

tried it... login didn't work.

Opps, reverse them please, sorry!

Jeff

Ps: clicking the Home button executes the code so you can repeat the test easily...

Ok that worked.

But let me backtrack... there's no problem with that kind of flash usage. It is engaging, and works well.

I thought it was going to be a typical please-wait-while-this-intro-loads deal. "functional" flash like this... I mean, you can debate its worth but at least its not useless. The fact is, you can do things in Flash that you simply can't do otherwise, so you make your choices and you take your lumps. I wouldn't change it.

In fact, if I were you I'm not even sure I'd go though the extreme effort of making a complete dial-up version of the site. Just do what you can to trim the flash files down. I don't know how large those are, but there are plenty of ways to make a swf get down to 30% of the size it is right out of the box.

In any case... it worked 10 out of 10 times for me.

• Steven

Steven,

I don't disagree at all with your reasoning...

It's just the five Flash elements in the banner and homepage are really the only thing we care about since we don't use Flash anywhere else on the site, so we really don't have to do a complete dial-up version of the site. Over dialup the homepage takes over a minute to load and the Flash guy we have says he can't make it any smaller so basically this exercise was just to Determine Bandwidth and eliminate the five elements and use fixed images in there place.

Like you I have not been able to make it fail using a 56K modem laptop and my dsl work machine, so I'm going to say this definetely does work... now whether we really use it or not will be determined.

Thanks again for your feedback!
Jeff

No problem here, works every and over 20 times.

Great! Thanks for helping test... I assume you are on a fast connection, right?

BTW, this is the article that prompted us to look into this issue...

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=193502066&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_All

Jeff

Yes, fast speed. :smile: