One of my colleagues told me that the under-30 crowd in India, and the very old people, speak much better English than the population in between. He said when the British left, they took their educators with them and the education system pretty nearly collapsed. In recent years they've brought it back, and all Indian children learn English as their second or third language (they'll learn the regional dialect at home, use only Indian or Hindi in school, and sometimes learn neighboring dialects or other languages in addition).
I don't usually have trouble understanding their accents either. Now, the Chinese students... well, if they'd learn English...
There's a really nifty thing he just did with our WAN that I think is just darn cool... You can probably appreciate this:
We have 25 offices around the country, and each one has two internet connections, to different providers (usually a T1 and a DSL or wireless backup, but the two biggest offices have a T3 with a T1 and wireless backup). The WAN is VPN based using Cisco IPSec (3DES... yadda yadda). The routers in each office now do ~on demand~ tunnels, building up and tearing down VPN tunnels on the fly, fully meshing all the offices, but without the overhead of any permanent static tunnels, and using both circuits in each place to load balance and failover... automatically healing around outages.
I think its just the most wicked cool thing ever. I dunno if it is perfectly bulletproof, but it's pretty darn close.
Now... once I get Exchange to replicate and failover to another site... *that* will rock. :-)