Posted by cwdjrxyz on 11/09/06 22:49

z.heineman@gmail.com wrote:
> We are looking to update our website to a flash based layout, but we do
> not want to loose customers because of long load times. I am hoping
> someone can inform me of a way to have the webserver determine the
> clients connection speed and decide whether to load a Flash or HTML
> website (lite version). Is this possible?.

I think that it is possible, but I can not point you to a ready-made
code. I think it likely would best be done on the server using php. It
is quite possible to determine download speed. For example a download
speed test for my isp which is SBC/Yahoo DSL is at
http://support.sbcglobal.net/dsl/speedtest/ . This sort of speed test
often uses JAVA. You would need only the download speed test, and of
course the location to which the viewing browser points for your test
would be on your own server. The speed test need not be very accurate,
so you can design the test to be fairly rapid. When the speed test is
completed, the user is then redirected to one page for a slow
connection and another for a fast connection, or possibly everything
could be done on a single page.

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