In this paper we present an analysis of over 236,000 file transfers 
between 10 widely distributed Internet hosts.  The goal of this work is to
broaden the understanding of how network path and congestion properties 
contribute to delays in TCP file transfers.  The first part of our analysis 
investigates how end-to-end path properties (eg. physical distance,
router hops, autonomous system hops, or bottleneck bandwidth) relate to
file transfer latency and variability.  We evaluate end-to-end 
path properties as a predictor of file transfer latency, and employ 
dimensionality-reducing techniques to identify clustering in path
space.  We find that expected transfer latency can be effectively 
predicted by a number of path properties and that the relationship 
between paths and latency is strongly linear with some intense outliers.  
The second part of our analysis employs critical path techniques to break 
down the network component of file transfer latency into three categories: 
propagation, queuing and loss.  We compare the contribution of each of
these components to delays along particular paths, and their effect on 
variability of total delay.  We find that propagation delay is the 
dominant aspect of expected total delay for most paths and that queuing 
and loss are substantial effects typically for a minority of paths.  On
these paths, queuing contributes most significantly to periodicity in total
delays while loss contributes most significantly to variability in total
delay.