How to determine our users' connection speed?

We've been talking about specs for the next generation of our sites, and one of the things that would be really helpful is to know what sort of net connection (or more precisely, the speed of the connection) each of our customers has.

I was thinking perhaps there's some little script somewhere that exists that we can install server side that will monitor how long it takes for a given user to download a particular video, and write that info to a table.

I checked with NatNet, but they didn't have any suggestions. Has anyone else heard of anything that would do this, or have any idea how to write a script to do that?

couldn't you tell based on the IP address is someone was on a dialup connections, dsl, or cable? I know the dsl isps have "dsl" in the ip address and most of the cable providers do as well. You might be able to run a Web Trends kind of report to show that as well.

I know that: http://www.quantcast.com/
will show you the demographics of your users and Geolocation.

We can def tell (with most users) whether it's DSL or Comcast or Roadrunner or whatever, but we wouldn't know whether it's, for example, 6Mbit DSL or 700K DSL... we're trying to figure out with a reasonable degree of certainty what % of customers have what... in part because we don't think our customers are necessarily representative of the average net user.

The other issue is... we thought of doing a survey, but half of our customers can barely turn on their computers, so there's no way they'll know what their bandwidth is...

Ask them when they login or join the site, with a quick little survey.

http://www.webdeveloper.com/forum/sh...ad.php?t=77891

look at that chip. it's a starting point for some coding.

I believe it's possible to write code in Flash to sniff out all sorts of things, including how fast one's internet connection is. I'm sure that data could be recorded as they click enter to your website, or another button which can export the data to a table, php or similar, or even loaded out of view. I looked into this years ago and was doable then, so I'm sure if not in flash, there must be something that can make that work.

There's a very good programmer resource I've used from time to time over at guru.com which has thousands of programmers across the globe if you ever need someone to program or assistance. ;-)

Chris, Chris, and Lloyd,

Thanks much for the info!

Chip,

If you have google adwords, the analytics section has great stats about your visitors, including connection speed :)