Aaron’s point is good, that once a user is in and involved in a task the patience factor increases, but my answer would have to be less than 10 in every case, and 5 or under for the Aaron factor on home pages and search pages.

Cheers, Harold

I fully agree: the entrance and orientation pages need to load very fast, but once the user is dedicated to complete a task that is important to him, he will have more patience.
The trend that people expect pages to load fast (2 seconds max, per sept 2009).
Sure, broadband internet access penetration and the increasing speed of those connections have fed the impatience. I also strongly believe that Google has greatly contributed to the high expectations towards web page load time. The Google search results pages load very fast (~0.5 seconds) and because people use Google daily and often, they ‘learn’ to be served this fast, and take this with them when using (on-site search on) other sites.

Now think Mobile.
3G connections are slow (compared to broadband on the desktop) and latency is a big problem.
The high expectations towards load time make challenge for mobile website developers to create good user experiences on the mobile phone even bigger than it already is.

- Aaron