In message <Pine.LNX.4.10.10102171056510.4084-100000@merlin.noc.adelphia.net>, Paul Bradford writes:

Charles, One thing I have a hard time explaining to some customers is that latency is one thing.... what does it tell me... it tells me that from one hop to another things are a bit slow.... the real important thing is how are you're throughput speeds... I started a thread a while back asking a similar question... is ping/traceroute a good measurement of throughput on the link? the unanimous response was use pathchar or mtr or ttcp which all give you a better guestimate of how your link is doing performance wise..

Latency and packet loss both put an upper bound on throughput. See, for example, http://www.acm.org/sigcomm/sigcomm98/tp/abs_25.html or draft-ietf-pilc-error-06.txt --Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb