Things can get even worse, with ping times in excess of 100 seconds being common. After a promising start, the link has become a victim of its own success, and, for all practical purposes is unusable for extended periods. Once you have access to information, it becomes easy to discover what you should have done in the first place. Wide area networking makes local area networking worthwhile. The identical silly questions have to be answered for each new generation of users and network administrators.
Mail based archive servers and effective utilisation of bandwidth are mutually exclusive concepts.
Wide area networking is a full time job, and needs support infrastructure. Networking breaks down barriers between people and cultures. And last, but not least, is the realization that networking, while sometimes aggravating, can also be lots of fun. In early June of 1992, commercial Cisco routers were installed, replacing the ka9q routers used on the international link. There was an immediate, and dramatic improvement in reliability and response times.