Most of today's applications perform very poorly with a modem connection and do not support e-mail queries. Direct data access can be unsatisfactory or impossible in many situations. Networks with low bandwidth network links or with large latency times may be as unacceptable as a modem connection using RAS. Latency time is the time it takes for a message to transverse the network. Most applications are engineered for high bandwidth networks and do not transfer well to other networks.