Keynote Systems (keynote.com) announced on Wednesday the results of its in-depth study on the performance of nine leading US credit card services Web sites, showing relatively lower service level rankings than expected.

Most of the sites performed poorly over dial up connections, which indicates the companies may have only factored in high-speed users while designing their Web sites. This oversight causes a serious inefficiency for the estimated 43 percent of US households that still use dial-up, resulting in an average wait of 35 seconds for each page of the transaction to download.

Keynote's service level rankings study assesses and compares the Web site's technical performance for the end users, reporting the strengths and weaknesses of each Web site. Sites are evaluated on a range of technical factors such as download speed, responsive time (over high speed, DSL and dial up connections), consistency, reliability, page design, Internet connectivity and scalability.

Bank of America, Capital One and MBNA were among the best overall performers achieving 77, 66 and 63 points out of 100 possible points respectively, while the lowest ranking sites achieved an overall ranking of only 38 and 34 points.