> >One's curiosity gets lowered when logging into an ftp site that proclaims
> >that you're 789 of a possible 1250 users, and the performance is like 
> >watching slugs fornicate.
> 
> You're sitting off of the MCI's backbone, which is suffereing from severe
> packet loss these days.  ftp.cdrom.com still has CPU and bandwidth to burn
> (it does around 12-14Mbs to the net right now out of a possible 100Mbs) and
> your poor performance has nothing to do with the machine's load.  The
> situation should improve once MCI finishes their backbone upgrade in the
> next few months.
> 
	In MCI's defense I think it's the crossover points, NAPS, that
	are the real problem.
	
	When I stay within MCI I get pretty close to full bore performance.
	It's only when I have to cross over to another provider that things
	turn to "slugs fornicating"...

	It seems popular to blame MCI these days for the NAP situation but
	it isn't their fault per say. A good chunk of their internal
	network is now OC3, 155Mbit ATM, and you can tell from the
	traceroutes.

		-Rob