Your not wrong there! I had an on going issue for around 2 months where my ping times were about 500ms to uk destinations. After troubleshooting here, I could see that the 3rd hop in their network was causing the issue. I phoned them and got the normal scripted response. After about an hour i gave up and tried another day. Same issue. EVENTUALLY! i got through to someone who seemed to know what he was talking about. We found that the router was indeed shafted and that he would tell the network guys. I phoned 2 days later to find out the progress and found that they had NO IDEA / NO CLUE about the previous phone call. So we had to start again, This happend about 4 times. Eventually i got hold of an engineer who managed to find that it was a problem with the 50Mb routers they use. He moved me to a new router and Pow. Problems fixed. I then logged a complaint and got a few months free after. Still VERY stressful and annoying.

Also,, Whats wrong with having more people about when big storms hit. I live in the UK and i know a few people who goto your country to chase storms. EVERY! time that catch a storm that has damaged areas they always stop to see if anyone requires help. Would these people prefer to be just left left for dead and only have a handful of weak science guys more worried about their kit than the lives of residents who have just had their lives shattered from a tornado? This is a pointlesss rant from a bunch of whiny so called scientists!

Multicast would not work well for something like this. The problem with multicast is it doesn't care if you dont get all the packets. So if your network looses one packet, your whole boot will fail and will have to wait for the next multicast start.