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Classic story where this is related: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

tl;dr timeout was sufficiently low and user sufficiently skilled to work out his emails could be delivered only within 500 miles

My favourite aspect of this story is how the academics, being academics, took it upon themselves to characterise the problem in detail before telling the postmaster about it. Could just as easily have said "huh, that's weird" and thrown it at them on day one.

And their explanation was probably more baffling to the admin than a simple "it is broken" report too. It would definitely have been for me.

C being speed of light

I get this same with AWS. The routes to my country in Northern Europe from us-* are terrible (eu-* is fine), to the point where a download from S3 during peak times can be tens of kB/s. If I connect to a VPN in another country it jumps to tens of MB/s.