Skive -- an idea, but -- Nope. The indicator appears to downloads at 30-50 kilobits per second and the indicator stops (no transmissions) while the web browser is still rendering. (When using reqwireless browser or using the OS 4.0 browser. The OS 3.7 browser appears to throttle data downloads to rendering speed)
Also reqwireless tells you how many kilobytes is being downloaded, so I can tell that 100 kilobytes downloaded in about 19 seconds, but the web browser kept rendering for about 40 to 60+ seconds (
http://news.google.com is an example of a website that downloads approximately 100 kilobytes via reqwireless, with images turned on -- total up the text download and image download kilobytes, and you've got the total kilobytes. Also count the number of seconds the transmissions indicator is flashing.). You can clearly see that downloads stop well before rendering stops, by the indicator dissappearing. You can even race to a dead spot (faraday cage) and the browser keeps rendering from the data already downloaded. By doing math at 100 kilobytes on 19 seconds, I know I broke the 5 kilobyte per second barrier. (100 divided by 19 is equal to 5.26 kilobytes per second, which would require a GPRS bandwidth of 50+ kilobits per second to accomodate that plus the overhead). Clearly, the web browser is still rendering at that point. Other days, the reqwireless server is a bit slow, and Blackberry browser is a bit faster, but usually reqwireless is much faster (not on text, but on images!).
It's 100% consistent. I alternate between web browsing and OTA, and OTA is clearly 3-4 times faster than web browsing. In the same spot.
It's not timeslot related, for sure, I had already thought of it, but have confirmed it is not that.