Information on the relative capacity and load of different POPs may be collected and stored locally and used to quickly determine the best site for an incoming connection based on these criteria. However, the internal load of a POP doesn't necessarily correlate to its apropriateness. An underloaded POP, 23 hops away may well provide inferior service to a more loaded POP, 2 hops away. It is certainly not accurate to say that communicating to all POPs is of equal cost for a given client. This is in contrast to load balancing over a LAN where communication to all servers can -- reasonably be expected to be equal.