One of the 'benefits' of being out of the office a lot is that I get to experience the Internet through the eyes of a large percentage of the Internet population - those who don't have broadband or huge office connectivity. My trusty Orange USB dongle is good for downloading email, albeit very slowly, even when I'm in densely populated areas. As a good example, I'm currently in Uxbridge, where I can only pick up GPRS connectivity, and in real world data terms, I've downloaded 5.6Mb of emails in 28 minutes. Skype is running slowly, MSN Messenger won't connect at all, and Windows Live Mail has crashed, leaving a window in the middle of the page with only an OK box, that doesn't work! To make it more annoying, I can't even move the window out of the way!
It's all too easy to forget a huge percentage of the Internet population accesses the Web at this speed. I'm not just talking about developing countries - but business users as well. We work with creative agencies who are only too happy to provide Flash files and graphics that are well over 2Mb - which means homepages end up being huge. In those cases, we'll often ask the agency to compress those offending files to make them smaller. The next time I hear of this situation, I'll bring the designer out to Uxbridge with my laptop & '3G' card and get them to download the file themselves!
