A utility that asks you to choose a mirror for the updates.
The second you type any yum command for the first time, you hit the red hat servers and that's slow as fsck.
A mirrors.fedora.redhat.com dns alias that points to mirrors (and is in the default FC3 setup) would be another option.
I was thinking about this problem for another system, maps for online games, and it occurred to me that a redirect server might be a good solution. Instead of using DNS to spread the load, create a module running under Apache that knows what servers have what modules and returns a 302 with a Location header to a randomly-chosen mirror. This could also address the issue of some mirrors being slower to update than others.
