Years ago David Cheriton at Stanford University taught me something that seemed obvious at the time - if you have a network link with low bandwidth then it's easy to put several in parallel to make a combined link with higher bandwidth, but if you have a network link with bad latency then no amount of money can turn any number of parallel links into a combined link with good latency

[Last week in TidBITS-367, Stuart examined issues of latency and delay in typical modem-based Internet communications. This week, Stuart offers general observations on how bandwidth can be used more efficiently and how it effects the overall latency of a connection.] Last week, I asked readers to imagine a world where the only network connection you can get to your house is a modem running over a telephone line at 33 Kbps