Got this interesting report (via Ran Atkinson) on performance of Internet. Academic paper but have lots of interesting information about quality of the network (packet loses, ping times, rount trip time etc) from US to various part of the world.
Bottomline: Internet Performance is improving a lot since 2001. :-)
Internet performance is improving each year with packet losses typically improving by 40-50% per year and Round Trip Times (RTTs) by 10-20% and, for some regions such as S. E. Europe, even more. Geosynchronous satellite connections are still important to countries with poor telecommunications infrastructure. In general for HEP countries satellite links are being replaced with land-line links with improved performance (in particular for RTT).
