[IxDA Discuss] "Acceptable" download/performance time on flash sites?

[Jerome Ryckborst]

There are a LOT of places where download time is an issue. If your audience includes people who live or travel outside mainland North America, I'd say ANY wait time you experience within North America is unacceptable, because you'll lose audiences elsewhere.

Here are five experiences of mine, four recent, about connection speed:

        A) I just returned from Alaska, yesterday, where I tried to keep up with my marking in an online course delivered via WebCT. It takes 5 clicks to get to each student's assignment, with a 2-minute wait after each click, and two more clicks to enter the mark and my feedback. And the system times out if I take too long to mark! (WebCT is *supposed* to be for delivering distance education!)

        B) Last October I spent 6 weeks in Australia and, let me tell you, I noticed that the world-wide web is slow there. They claim that content within Australia is delivered faster, but I'm here to say that content from North America doesn't download fast to Australia.

        C) At the start of this month, a colleague in India spoke to me on Skype. As usual, we didn't have the bandwidth for video, only for voice. I walked/talked him through our intranet. On Skype, he told me "I clicked [a link]" and then we waited while a page loaded from our SharePoint site. It took unbelievably long, much longer than the few seconds that it took me to load the same page from home, in Vancouver, Canada.

        D) Last week, three of my colleagues did not bother to FTP to me some 100-MB data files from South Africa because it was "too time-consuming" for them to bother uploading when they'd be returning home this week. One of them returns home to Australia, though, so his FTP upload time will be longer than for my two Vancouver colleagues.

        E) The above are all current examples. Here's an older example. Four years ago, I phone my parents in west Africa, and asked them: "So, what are you up to, today?" They were downloading e-mail from AOL, and had been for hours. The phone connection was typically poor and the downloading would restart instead of continue, every time the connection was regained. They still live there, BTW. I also recall a satellite phone connection with my dad (so not the local phone system) that was so clear, when I mentioned to him the slight hissing on the line, my dad closed the sliding glass door to block out the hissing sound of waves on the beach.