Thanks to Brew for the info ... Our own coding guru, shovel, at Half-Lifenews.com has created some graphs that show how using the new Steam Client for Half-Life2 will cut the connect time to Half-Life2 game servers considerably. Check out the new charts for Steam implementation into the Half-Life 2 muliplayer system. They're not final by Steam and we do expect changes from them in the future. We'll be sure to keep these up to date as time persists.

Half-Life 2 Steam Client Cuts Connection Times