On Oct 15, 1996 at 19:46, Keith Richardson of 3:711/934.6 wrote:

 KR> my new employer is quite enlightened, we have a share of an mci 64k line
 KR> to a server in ireland, thence by a 256k line to boston, you can
 KR> usually get about 6k out of it for most of the day...

Hardly anyone else must be using those combined lines.

 KR> ...both the europeans and the yanks are asleep.

Time of day appears to make no difference - "everyone" (usual
rules about generalisations apply) tries to use the 'net at night to take
advantage of allegedly "lower usage" due to people asleep;  thing
is, this happens right 'round the world, so in effect the 'net really is a
24-hour operation (and our stats prove this is so).

Besides, you probably get to skip Telstra's flooded pipe to MCI in San
Francisco (although it still probably uses PACRIM-West anyway), and
*that's* the key!  :-)

 KR> they are moving though to an intranet with internal web pages
 KR> providing communication.

Don't start worrying until someone says, "That's okay, we can do it
with Java!"  At that point, consider suicide.

 KR> it does seem odd though dialling in from home to get my mail from ozemail
 KR> via our office in north sydney, ireland, boston, and back to north
 KR> sydney, its nearly as fast as dialling in directly though.

The physical network matters not a damn these days - it's all in the hands
of the routing tables (which, sadly, are often quite screwed).  You're
lucky that the path you want to traverse is sufficiently ignored by other
users so that you can get half-decent performance out of it.

Cheers..

    - dave
    d.begley{at}ieee.org

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