The reasoning about a relation between generation times and connection speed is flawed:
- Browser sends the server a page request.
- Server generates the page.
- Server sends the page to the browser.
Since these 3 steps are done in sequence, there's no chance that the server will take longer to generate the page if the "request was made slower" because it starts generating the page after the request has been completed in fact, the process of receiving the request is transparent to the web server because the TCP/IP protocol handles the traffic.
Now, it will neither take longer to generate if the page is being downloaded "slower" since it was already generated.
Seems that the Steve guy was either talking about something else or he has no idea about the meaning of "generation time".