Well, if you are using an index, when you "seek" you are really obtaining an offset from the physical file. According to this offset and how the system is configured, Foxpro gets a chunk of data "around" this offset and puts it into memory. That's why when you "skip" to the next or previous record you get it inmediately. But what you get is n clusters of data containing m logical registers from the table.

This approach would have no sense if the remote query was with LOCATE. Then, the whole file would have to go through the wire.