  The internet has been used for data transfer in radio astronomy ever since
its inception; however it is only recently that network bandwidth capability
means that the internet becomes competitive with traditional forms of data
storage. Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) uses widely separated
telescopes between which high bandwidth direct connections have not been
feasible until recently. The academic networks now allow us to connect at high
data rates (~1Gbps) in "eVLBI". The ESLEA project (Exploitation of Switched
Lightpaths for E-science Applications) has played a major role in the
development of eVLBI. We outline this development in this paper.
