Though this does not pertain strictly to Linux users, I do find myself wondering why it takes so long for something to download or I am getting bad quality from my video-conferencing.

After tracerouting the problem and find nothing I am utterly perplexed, so I  went on a search for a site that will tell me about the "health" of the internet and like just about anything, if you look hard enough you will find it.

Below is a link of major hubs and their ping times. Maybe it will be useful to some of you out there.

http://scoreboard.keynote.com/scoreboard/Main.aspx?Login=Y&Username=public&Password=public

Zelo
http://www.zelo.com
http://www.name-stats.com

Nice finds
Cogent and Level3 had a bit of a falling out, and killed the internet for a few days. It was awful, pages sometimes wouldn\'t even load .

You can read more about what happened here.