Can you target bandwidth's?

br3n

br3n

Senior Member
Im just wondering if there is a way to work out what kind of bandwidth a user has - I use media queries on my website but its very image heavy...

I could use a media qurie to target small screens such as mobiles and serve smaller files but what happens if theyre on wifi or something?

Would be nice if their was a media query for bandwidth.
 
realistically without including some sort of test or box selection before loading I doubt that would be possible.

Having said that silverlight can do variable streaming depending on your download speed....but I think that's dynamic based on buffering/stutter etc
 
I think it would definitely be something that could be useful now mobile specific sites are being phased out or at least down
 
br3n said:
I think it would definitely be something that could be useful now mobile specific sites are being phased out or at least down
Click to expand...
well wouldn't it be easier to just have a 'mobile' css file which doesn't use as many images or uses mobile optimised sizes (ie smaller)...in the same way you can have an ie css file etc.

Forgot to say - most mobile isps now seem to be implementing compression of some sort anyways with larger images. Bit like opera's 'turbo' mode where it offloads the website to a server first and then sends compressed files to the phone. Amazon's silk browser in the kindle fire does similar.
 
Ahh thats a clever solution...

With regards to using a mobile css thats pretty much what I was thinking but rather than using screensize to determine it would be better to use bandwidth, as the same device performs completely differently on 3g as it would on a good wifi connection.
 
br3n said:
as the same device performs completely differently on 3g as it would on a good wifi connection.
Click to expand...

yeah likely the 3g is faster unless you're on your own home wifi lol
 
Disagree - a huge amount of major retailers offer high speed wifi, I know that mcdonnalds, costa, starbucks etc all use a company called "the cloud" (not to be confused with cloud) which offers a fast and free wifi connection.
 
It's only fast if it's not over saturated. Usually the wifi out my way is slow as anything lol
 
Is it possible you could test the speed at which the user downloads an image, any image from the sites design could be used or you could designate one which is larger.

I'm not sure if this could be done in PHP or by JavaScript, but this could return a value depending on how quickly the image/file is downloaded which then prompts the browser to load a different set of images for your media queries.

As for free wi-fi, I don't rate it very highly at all! It just never seems to work.
 
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