On Sat, 21 Sep 1996 04:28:55 -0500 "Ingrid H. Shafer" <[log in to unmask]> said: >European sites take no more time to load than my local provider 40 miles >down the turnpike. EXCUSE ME??? If that's really the case, maybe you need to find a better local provider! Overseas access worked great when we upgraded from 2M to 34M (which I am sorry to report only happened because of an IETF conference being hosted in Europe). It takes a while for traffic to catch up to a factor of 17 increase. Now it has caught up, and in 2 months it will be completely unbearable. Since the network is funded by the governments in Europe, people have to go to the ministry of Research or Education or whatever and say "Uh, the Internet is becoming more and more popular, so, uh, please triple our budget again like last year, thanks!" On top of that, the money is for more US connectivity, which is exactly what the politicians do not want to hear. The US is the last place where they want their research networking infrastructure to be developed, everything should be done within Europe. Significant energy is expended developing hypocritical plans to collect the necessary money for a US line. For instance, you can tell the politicians you want to develop a state of the art networking infrastructure for whatever region in your country has the highest and most chronical degree of unemployment. Having this, you need to upgrade your backbone, and this includes all lines, even the US line, and here is the cost. You end up upgrading a national backbone that is maybe 10% used to start with, just so you can get funding for the international lines your need. So, we're pretty much like a family of 8 trying to fit into a Buggy somehow. The last thing we need is people who own a Buick hopping into our Buggy on the basis that the Buick doesn't appear to go any faster when stuck in traffic! :-) Eric