Patent ID: 7475129

Claim:
A method for providing a service for estimating the obtainable bandwidth of a client's network connection, said method comprising: a service provider receiving, from a server, a request for bandwidth estimation of a bandwidth of a connection between the server and the client; the service provider responding to the request for bandwidth estimation by providing the client with a snippet that is an executable configured to request the server to serve first and second objects, in a chronologically sequential manner, to the client via the connection; the service provider receiving, from the snippet at the client, information indicative of time elapsed between delivery of the first and second objects; and estimating the bandwidth of the connection based in part on the elapsed time; wherein the snippet includes: instructions for creating first and second image objects; instructions for generating a unique identifier (unique ID); and instructions for associating the first and second image objects with the first and second objects on the server using URLs containing the unique ID.