good posts mr-b, I have noticed the speed disprencancy on uk and eu sites tho, including my own server, I did several speed tests over http from a server that does 360kB over single threaded ftp and the results confirmed my problem. What you say about rwin makes sense as to why the issues might be occuring, I can post a http link later to a dedicated 100mbit link in germany and let you do some further analysis if you like.
I will also go back to a slow proxy and then run this url below on it and see what I get.
http://www.ircache.net/cgi-bin/cacheability.py