Reader Preferences-Internet-Connection Speed: What does this do?

Question

Can someone explain what exactly this setting controls or manages? When I search I see different mentions of what this setting controls, from only controlling multimedia to controlling how fast the .pdf actually opens.
The latter makes no sense; why would you throttle how fast a .pdf opens via this setting? At least managing multimedia makes sense, as that could control the quality of the media being downloaded. Faster speed = bigger better video file, etc.
Regardless, I have a request to make a Group Policy change for thousands of users to set this from the default of 56K to LAN, and I want to understand what this setting actually manages, and what the ramifications of making this change are for all users.
What happens if I set it to LAN for all users then someone is in a remote region of the world and only working on dial-up? It does still happen!
Using Reader 11 on IE8 and IE9 on Windows 7 64 bit.
Thanks!

Answer 1

jlaqua2 wrote:
Can someone explain what exactly this setting controls or manages? When I search I see different mentions of what this setting controls, from only controlling multimedia to controlling how fast the .pdf actually opens.
The latter makes no sense; why would you throttle how fast a .pdf opens via this setting? At least managing multimedia makes sense, as that could control the quality of the media being downloaded. Faster speed = bigger better video file, etc.
Regardless, I have a request to make a Group Policy change for thousands of users to set this from the default of 56K to LAN, and I want to understand what this setting actually manages, and what the ramifications of making this change are for all users.
What happens if I set it to LAN for all users then someone is in a remote region of the world and only working on dial-up? It does still happen!
Using Reader 11 on IE8 and IE9 on Windows 7 64 bit.
Thanks!
Can someone explain what exactly this setting controls or manages? When I search I see different mentions of what this setting controls, from only controlling multimedia to controlling how fast the .pdf actually opens.
It controls the enabling or disabling of certain "caching" for large PDFs or those that contain multimedia, which load slower on dial up connections. It has NO BEARING WHATSOEVER on opening local PDFs.
Regardless, I have a request to make a Group Policy change for thousands of users to set this from the default of 56K to LAN, and I want to understand what this setting actually manages, and what the ramifications of making this change are for all users.
That would all depend on what the ACTUAL connection is for those users. IF they're all on a LAN, then it would be OK to set LAN as the default in deployment.
What happens if I set it to LAN for all users then someone is in a remote region of the world and only working on dial-up? It does still happen!
Then the end user would need to go in and reset it to "Dial up".
FWIW - The reason it's set to Dial up by default is that ANY connection speed faster than 56k will still work with this setting. The reverse isn't so. If someone has their connection set to LAN and they're on dialup, a large ddocument will take forever to load in a browser window, because things like preloading images and media are enabled and not cached under the LAN setting, and with dialup, the PDF will need to load all that content AS IT DOWNLOADS, likely leading to a browser "lockup".