thanks. in the meantime a much smarter friend than me sent this link

More BlackBerry Bold Browser Speed Trials Raise Questions, Problems | BlackBerry Cool

and had me enable javascript on the bold. that didn't fix anything on sites i had been trying. BUT, i tried your texan... site (WITH js enabled) and for the first time got some results back. not sure how to interpret, they read:

Your line speed:
14571.4

Kbps
1785.7

K bytes/sec

(then a red line going up above 2Mbps)

then i changed browser configuration so as no longer to support javascript, and instead prompt to enable... then the test would no longer run (or at least it would no longer give results)