The work I do is typically on sites targeted at higher-end business users, so we really don’t worry about modems anymore. But still, viewing a site at LAN speed or (or just on localhost) is 10 to 1000 times faster than most internet connections.

I have a few ways to test:

1) For broadband speed tests, I usually fire up the VPN out to my house, remote desktop into my home computer, fire up a VPN back to the office and then browse over that connection. The VPN maxes out in the 1 megabit range, so it provides a pretty clear picture of how things will work over a typical broadband connection.

2) For narrowband speed tests, I just use my blackberry as a tethered modem. It is a very laggy 56k connection so it brings out the worst dial-up has to offer.

Check out the dot-point starting with “Regularly use your site from a realistic net connection.” here:
Optimizing Page Load Time – die.net
(sorry, there’s no ID/anchor to link to near the dot point)

Well, the *best* way to test dialup is to use dialup.

Modems are cheap and so are dialup accounts.

This message is being written on dialup.

Now, on the subject of the form, it’s a horror show when “designers” feel the need to add some whizbang feature in some homage to being cool. Worse yet, they probably got a promotion out of it :(

They could have actually improved things by putting the checkboxes in 3 columns to make better use of the screen real estate.

Vendors get away with this because they have a captive market. Once a telephone company, always a telephone company.

Latency demo with commentary
http://www.phppatterns.com/stuff/latency.html

AJAX Proxy
http://ajaxblog.com/archives/2005/08/08/ajax-proxy-02

Switch Proxy extension for Firefox
http://www.roundtwo.com/product/switchproxy

Near as I can figure, Harry wrote the proxy himself. Can always ask him about it directly if you need more info on it.

There are proxy scripts that you can run on your development machine that can be used to simulate slow and noisy connections. I think one of which is part of the Apache project or at least in their Incubator sections.

If only I could remember the name of it. I think Harry pointed out one a while ago on one of his blog entries here at Sitepoint.

Plus I don’t think it helps that Cingular’s web site is really slow. Its probably doing alot of cumbersome processing behind the scenes, which isn’t necessarily anything to do with JSP.

Plus I don’t think it helps that Cingular’s web site is really slow, its probably doing alot of cumbersome processing behind the scenes, which isn’t necessarily anything to do with JSP.

sorry for taking off topic, but you’ve just hit a point that is a concern, as you point out;

does anyone know of a way to retard the connection speed during local development? i mean… to cause a slow down, etc without actually the need to modify existing script that is :)

if there were, then we would have a better indication of what effect(s) this would have on our ui design.

dr livingston, as always

And too bad they pretty much quit shipping cool Nokias to the us. The only ones offered here are low, low end models for use as prepaid phones.

As for your b., check out the Sony Erikson K800i, which is what I’m using. It has the features that you want.