Even those users who access the net from a corporate or university site with a T1 connection or greater can experience frustrating delays, when the capacity of a connection to the net is not to blame. The main trunk lines of the net, or their nexus points, are often the problem. In the United States, the Internet, once the domain of the National Science Foundation Network, became an entirely private system about a year ago. The growth of the traffic on the net has led to some congestion problems, and these are often the cause when connection times are slow. Upgrades are constantly in the works, but the problem is not likely to go away overnight, since the Internet traffic itself continues to double every nine months or so.
Routers act rather like pinball machines.
A message traveling through the Internet will see its journey as a flight through long stretches of fibre optic cable interrupted by an occasional rattle as a router's electronic flippers send it flying along its next path on the way to its destination. The fibre may be able to handle a vast number of messages, but the routers cannot. And then of course, sometimes it is the site's problem. It appears now that SPIE is not immune to this general Internet slowdown, and we've seen an increase in comments about slow server performance over the past few weeks. And while a few minor changes have been made, it was determined that our dedicated T1 Internet connection is well below capacity even at peak traffic times, so unfortunately the slowness experienced by some users is likely due to one or more of the external factors outlined above.