How fast you will experience something like this depends on four factors:
1) Your connection speed
2) The host site's connection speed
3) The host site's performance
4) Network congestion between you.
For your connection speed, keep in mind that DSL and CableModem are both bandwidth sharing arrangments. Your connection speed will vary depending on what your neighbors with whom you share some fixed bandwidth are doing.
Any data communications facility is characterized by several parameters. One of those is called ABR, Assured Bit Rate. This is the minimum amount of bandwidth that you are guaranteed to have available to you. The ABR of DSL is literally zero. You are not assured of any bandwidth at all. That's why it's cheap. If you want an ABR of 1MBit/second, you can have the phone company install a fractional T1 Frame Relay line to your house and deliver that service for you. In most areas of the country, this will cost the better part of $1000/month. By lowering the ABR to zero, DSL allows the telephone company to deliver you a good fraction of the service that T1 would have given you for only about $30/month. With DSL, your local telephone line is connected back at the telephone company's Central Office to a gizmo called a DSLAM (pronounced Dee Slam). It stands for DSL (which, itself, stands for Digital Service Loop) Access Multiplexer. The DSLAM separates the voice component from the data component. The voice component is sent on to the conventional telephone switch. And the data are sent to your ISP (Internet Service Provider) typically via a frame relay network. The trick lies in the word "multiplexer". Multi is short for multiple.
It's sort of like the road in front of your house. That road is not big enough to accommodate all of the cars in your neighborhood at once. If everyone in your neighborhood decided to come or go at the same time, the road would not be big enough to accommodate all those cars and you would have "congestion." You'd have to take turns. Some people would have to wait. So, why did the stupid city build an insufficient road? The answer is that a sufficiently large road would be very, very expensive and, in fact, the case of everyone trying to come or go at exactly the same time doesn't happen very often. The fact is that almost all the time, everyone is able to come and go with no delay using that insufficient road. The road is a shared resource, it is multiplexed. You are not guaranteed access to that road at any given moment of the day. Your "assured car rate" is zero. But, most of the time, you get the access you need immediately.
Your driveway, on the other hand, is yours. You are assured access to your driveway whenever you want it.
With DSL, the "driveway" rate, the rate between your house and the central office, may be 768KBits/second, for example. You will always have 768K between your house and the DSLAM at the central office. And if all you ever want to do is chat with the DSLAM, you'll be able to do so very fast all the time. But DSLAMs aren't very exciting to talk to. No, you probably want to talk beyond the DSLAM and that's where the multiplexing comes in. That's where your driveway hits the main road, where your ABR goes to zero.
A typical DSLAM will take upto 32 local users. It will give each local user local access (driveway bandwidth, if you will) of 256KBits/second to 1MBit/second depending on what they pay for. But, the DSLAM then muliplexes all of those local users onto a single T1 at 1.544MBits/second. If you have, for example, 768KBit/second local access, and you are the only active user on your DSLAM a the moment, then you will have a full 768KBits/second of access to the internet. And if your neighbor who also has 768K DSL logs on, then he will also get full access since 768K+768K is less than 1.544M. But, if a third neighbor joins you, then we've got a problem. 768K + 768K + 768K = 2.304M which is greater than 1.544M. Essentially, three cars are now contending for a two-lane road. So, there's gonna be some delays.
Wow, just three users on and you start having delays. And a typical DSLAM serves 32 users. Obviously, there's delays a lot. But it's not as bad as you might think. Right now, I'm online, but I'm busy typing a reply, so I'm not actually using much bandwidth.
So, what's the point of all of this? Simple. The fact that you have 768KBit/second DSL does not mean that you have 768KBit/second internet access. It means that you have 768KBit/second local access to your DSLAM. From there, you are guaranteed exactly zero bits/second. What you actually get depends on what your neighbors are doing at that exact moment.
CableModem is similar. You are sharing bandwidth with your neighbors. The datarate you actually achieve will depend on what they're doing.
Accessing a website involves your computer, but it also involves another computer, called a "host" or "server". You may have heard Spark curse about his server, the server that hosts bladeforums.com. The server is a computer much like yours and it also has an internet connection. That connection has all the same issues that your connection has.
But, there's more. Just as your computer may slow down when you're doing many tasks or doing complex tasks (video editting, for esample), the server also slows down when its doing complex tasks or when many people are using it.
So, how fast you will experience a website depends not just on your local connection, but on the server's connection and performance.
Finally, to get from the server to your computer, data must go through some other computers. This is called a "network." All of those other computers have connections with all of the same multiplexing issues and they are all computers with the same performance issues.
Over the last few days, a sort of agressive virus program has been circulating on the internet that has dramatically congested the network.
So, how fast you will experience a website depends not just on your local connection, but on the server's connection and performance and also on the connections and performance of perhaps dozens of computers along the way.
The videos start instantly, and the only real purpose is to the see the knife in action. Most are autos.