"Truthfully, when people say the Internet is slow, you have no idea what's going on," Kim Holden, IT director at the Framingham, Mass.-based global construction company, said last week. "There are a lot of finger-pointing exercises."

More than 250 workers at Perini's corporate headquarters use Primavera Systems Inc.'s Expedition project management software. It is hosted by LoadSpring Solutions Inc., an application service provider in Lawrence, Mass., on servers accessed over T1 links in a WAN.

"With third-party hosting, you're never sure if the problem is on their end, so you have to eliminate some of the causes and make sure you're not just shooting in the dark," Holden said. Expedition, widely used in the construction industry, wasn't considered the culprit.

To find and fix the problem, Perini's small IT staff first looked at using intrusion- detection software and then eyed packet shaping to improve network performance. The staff decided instead to use traffic management software, choosing Converted Traffic Manager (CTM) from Converged Access Inc. in Billerica, Mass.

Holden said the CTM software can create traffic categories based on business priorities, a key requirement for her group.