towards the geospatial semantic web

Hi,
one easy way to reduce the network transfer size is to enable gzip compression at the http level. This is usually done at the http server/web container level.
For example, with Tomcat you have to hack the server.xml file and include the MIME types in the compressableMimeType attribute, more information here: http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/config/http.html

This may reduce the amount of data that is actually travelling over the network by 10 times, without the user noticing it (gzip compression is part of the HTTP standard, compatible clients will handle it transparently).