File Download Time Calculator
= worth knowing
Online Tool
FREE

“Have you ever experienced the frustration of waiting for a web site to download, then giving up and moving on to another? This is because most web users lose their attention after 10 seconds. If your site takes longer than this to load, you will be losing many visitors. This means that the web designer must use images sparingly and choose file formats carefully.”

This was the introduction of a previous MasterMind Explorer Review in which Robin Good (alias Luigi Canali De Rossi) told you How to Calculate and Speed-Up the Download Time of Your Web Site. Today I’m introducing a tool to you that makes your life easier by taking the task of manually calculating file download times from you.

Jim Martindale's File Download Time Calculator is a simple but very useful tool. You enter the file size of whatever you want to offer for downloading and the calculator tells you the approximate download time for various Internet connection speeds. What makes Jim Martindale's File Download Time Calculator superior to similar tools like the Bandwith.com File Download Time Calculator is its comprehensiveness. Download times are calculated for modems with a speed of 14.4 Kbps (kilobits per second), for OC-12 connections (75,000,000 bytes per second), as well as for wireless connections. Altogether 32 different connection speeds are covered.

Combined with a live tracker that analyses the Internet connection speed of your Site visitors (see MasterMind Review about live trackers) the File Download Time Calculator can support you effectively in making your Site usable. For example, if you have found out with a tracker that 40% of your users have a connection speed slower than 56 Kbps and you have calculated that it would take them at least 3 hours to download the file you planned to offer, you will know that you have to minimize the size of your file or provide an alternative file.

It would be desirable that Jim Martindale moves his Calculator to the top of his Web page so that users do not have to scroll before they can see and use it. For people that are less familiar with internet connections more information about the meaning of abbreviations like “OC-1” would be useful (e.g. How many bytes are transmitted? In which countries are these connections available?).