... [link|http://www.akamai.com/|Akamai] do forward caching and other exotica of that ilk. We pay them a lot of money so that we don't have to have 5 times as many web servers.

In addition, AFAIK most broadband ISPs in Austalia have transparant proxies. This is usually because most broadband is DSL, implemented as PPPoE, so the optimum Ethernet framesize is a little lower than the maximunm. Unfortunately, a noticeable portion of the internet cannot handle that, resulting in very poor connections to those sites due to the sub-optimal packet fragmentation. The solution usually employed is a transparent proxy at the ISP for all web traffic. They do not provide information about bypassing them.

Wade.