topological closeness....

Hello,

Gopi K Garge wrote:

  IMHO, in the context of the AP region, I guess we are overlooking the
  user perspective - locally available "Internet" content. Barring
  .au, .sg, .kr, .hk (?), .jp and .tw, I do not see any major effort
  around to provide locally, content that is available in the US
  be it the GNU archive, the WU archive or one-of-those Beatles
  song and lyrics archive - result - good amount of traffic to the
  US.

With limited bandwidth, updating these archives would be slow,
and, you wouldn't know yet if there are enough people accessing
these to justify getting a mirror.

Caching should help getting commonly requested information faster.

      When one sees such traffic trends, why would an ISP even think in
      terms of investing in a link to a place other than the US - the cost
  permitting ?

In the long term, as the Internet becomes more common, regional content
will become more important, IMHO. So develop the local content -
and the local infrastructure - and regional intranets, and virtual
private networks - will come in.