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

More than 250 Perini workers at corporate headquarters use project management software called Expedition, which is hosted by LoadSpring Solutions Inc., an application services 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.

Perini's small IT staff looked first at intrusion-detection software, then eyed packet shaping to improve network performance. The Expedition application itself is widely used in the construction industry and wasn't considered the culprit.

The IT staffers then investigated a few traffic management software products, eventually choosing Converted Traffic Manager (CTM) from Converged Access Inc. in Billerica, Mass.

Holden said she liked the Converged Access philosophy: to help create traffic categories based on a company's business priorities.