Enh rqst: subversion being more robust in the face of poorly performing network or unreliable connection

Hello everyone,

I am currently working at a place where, IMHO, the network is poorly
configured. Connections are unreliable and average transmission rates are
worse than poor ADSL dialup. Under these conditions we have a few problems
with subversion. A brand new checkout of the entire repo is often
interrupted with socket errors. Sometimes these force us to say 'svn
cleanup' before resuming with 'svn up'. Even when the connection is not
dropped it is very slow to get all the files. Hence, I was wondering if the
network code might be improved to make it more robust in the face of
network glitches. Also, could the file fetches be done in parallel?

I realize these are non-trivial changes but is there any chance a future of
subversion may have them? Please? Otherwise the robustness would have to be
added at application level in tools such as Tortoise SVN. That's fine for
Windows but I also see the issue on the command line on linux.

-- 
Regards,
Andrew Marlow
http://www.andrewpetermarlow.co.uk