i agree my experience isn't relevant to john's problem. his ping times are about 1/5 or less of what mine were. more significantly, the fact that his significant delay happens before authentication points towards something in the auth process (factotum+secstore).
in general, though: networks have gotten faster, but not terribly much quicker. there's been no significant change in latency between machines i've been paying attention to in various parts of the US (mostly east coast) and western europe (mostly London) for the past 4 years. the bandwidth (and bandwidth/$) have both improved significantly. (this is not true for asia, especially india, where i've seen very significant improvements)
