trouble in Sprint land?

[Steve Bellovin <smb () research att com>]

What is going on here?  I've seen similar delays -- i.e., over 4 
seconds -- for several days now, though only during the day.  It's also 
not just the routers being slow about pings; round-trip to the 
destination (www.law.cornell.edu, in this case) is over 5 seconds:

PING www.law.cornell.edu (128.253.22.200): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 128.253.22.200: icmp_seq=0 ttl=238 time=5116.59 ms
64 bytes from 128.253.22.200: icmp_seq=1 ttl=238 time=5174.68 ms
64 bytes from 128.253.22.200: icmp_seq=2 ttl=238 time=5200.65 ms
64 bytes from 128.253.22.200: icmp_seq=3 ttl=238 time=5163.74 ms
64 bytes from 128.253.22.200: icmp_seq=4 ttl=238 time=5062.49 ms
64 bytes from 128.253.22.200: icmp_seq=5 ttl=238 time=5075.5 ms
64 bytes from 128.253.22.200: icmp_seq=6 ttl=238 time=5112.46 ms
64 bytes from 128.253.22.200: icmp_seq=7 ttl=238 time=5205.24 ms
64 bytes from 128.253.22.200: icmp_seq=8 ttl=238 time=5228.75 ms


                --Steve Bellovin