Keep in mind, some of the latest reports I've seen indicate that the US is
number 20 for broadband penetration in the world. Sure there are lots of
houses that have it, but there are still a lot that have dialup.
The rule of thumb is no more than 12 to 16 seconds to view a page. Anything
less and people just move on. To figure out how many seconds your page takes
to load on a dialup connection, determine the size of the HTML file and all
the images and other objects that will be embedded within it, then divide by
5. That should give you a good idea of the number of seconds it will take to
download.
You may want to see if some of the images you use throughout your pages
could be optimized. For example: instead of having JPGs set at a 95%, drop
it down to about 85%, the 10% difference in compression isn't very
noticeable in most images for quality but will make the file size
appreciably smaller. Also check to see if you can gain a benefit by
converting some JPGs to GIFs as some images will only use a limited color
pallete and you can tell the file to use anywhere from 1 to 256 colors. The
smaller the GIF pallete the smaller the filesize. Sometimes changing a JPG
to a GIF (or a GIF to a JPG) will result in a smaller file without loss of
quality and clarity.