I was having coffee with a friend today who does work with people in countries where internet speeds are down at dial-up rates of 28.8kbps on a good day and where it is rare for workers to have their own internet connection in the office let alone at home.

I mentioned the recent post I’d written about myspace pages taking 5 minutes to load in India and Brazil.

It struck me that it would make sense for people with such low speed connections to the internet to use the mobile versions of the websites instead.

Another advantage of the mobile versions of these sites is that they cut out a lot of the clutter that you see on the normal pages because they’ve been pared down for faster download speeds for mobile devices.

Try these out for size:

• Flickr mobile site (yes, photos not best for low bandwidth I guess)
• Yahoo
• BBC News
• BBC homepage
• National Rail enquiries (UK)
• eBay (UK)

The following appear to intercept my browser request, notice I’m not on a mobile, and serve me the standard versions. Maybe there’s a way round this.

• m.facebook.com
• m.google.com