“Latency Lags Bandwidth” by David A. Patterson
Communications of the ACM, October 2004, p 71-75

This is an excellent article that makes the case for why latency (end to end round trip time) is not keeping pace with bandwidth (the amount of information you can get through a channel in a given amount of time). Patterson presents a great deal of historical data to support this contention. He explains why this has been so and will continue to be so, but more interestingly from our standpoint, he goes on to prescribe three strategies for dealing with this imbalance. His three strategies are: caching, replication and prediction. Frequent visitors here will recognize our themes:  we have been advocating replication for several years now as a key part of your messaging strategy. Our XML cache is analogous to the caches he refers to (although many of his examples are at the chip level, the point is the same), and our “big message” strategy hits both the caching and prediction strategy.