Suitability will depend largely on what your users place on your forum. Text takes a minimal amount of time to download. Images considerably longer.
A single text character can be taken as one byte, probably two if you are not using a Latin character set.
A byte is eight bits. You say the slower speed you can expect is 128kilobits per second. That means roughly 16,000 characters a second can be transmitted. Let's be extremely conservative and say there are overheads in transmission (packeting, error checks, hand-shaking with servers along the route, and the like) which halve the apparent speed. That's still 8k, or more than two pages of plain text on A4/Letter paper a second. However, there's also a significant overhead in bringing that text to the screen as it is heavily formatted, so let's half it again to allow for that.
Actually, I am sure that that transmission overheads are much lower than I suggest, but I haven't got the figures to hand.
Images are a different matter. Let's say you ask users to limit themselves to images with a longer side measuring 500px. Typical photos of that size are around 55k and would take around 7 seconds to appear. You can, of course, do things to discourage excessive graphics, such as setting your forum to show only small avatars - when most people won't bother to use them anyway.
It also depends on how you want to use the forum and whether connection is continuous. One of the advantages of Nabble's system is that you can communicate with the forum entirely by email and you don't necessarily need to be online to read and prepare responses for posting.
Volunteer Helper - but recommending that users move off the platform!
Once the admin for GregHelp now deleted.
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