the latency problem does not show up before you have actual propagation delay. if you're next door with a 34k modem, all your latency is bare transmission time (time spent stuffing bits along the wire), and you are prefectly happy because your link gets full utilization. now, if you are physically 200ms away and have a the fastest link on the planet, you might be less than happy using 1 second [Twalk Topen, Tread, Tread, Tclunk] to read a file of any size, because your fast and fancy link isn't used, so you're paying for nothing. the problem really does exist, but there are bigger ones that are easier to solve.