Paul,
Duh.
You won't mind if I quote you, here? ;-)
And geography is *not* important. I can show you several organizational networks located in one country, with their principle Internet connectivity located in another country entirely. Geographic location means absolutely nothing.
It is where they connect in the global hierarchy.
This is true [at the interprovider level]. Today. However, as deregulation continues [like a freight train with constant acceleration] what will incentivize "organizational networks" to maintain these geographically disparate connections? When Internet demand continues, and more fiber is run, and competitive LEC and IXCs develop in europe, pacrim, and africa, the infrastructure will increase, and these distant connections will become financially prohibitive.* The market will make topology follow geography. But not for a while. The next interesting model to study is that of ubiquitous banwidth. With this model geography will have no bearing on topology. So I see three phases of bandwidth growth, with corresponding effects on the correlation: Time Bandwidth Correlation --------- ----------------------- ------------ Today Consolidated Bandwidth Low Soon Available Bandwidth High Someday Oversupply of Bandwidth Low With an oversupply of bandwidth (like we had w/ long distance providers in the mid to late 80s) backhauling traffic is cost-effective allowing a noncommodity based market to emerge. When South African ISPs can interconnect to a continental operating company/network ina cost effective manner, we can be they'll do so. And this is the trend I envision towards correlating topology and geography. -alan * the key premise I'm making here is that as the value of a local connection increases, geography and topology will converge. As the value of such decreases, they will diverge. The value is a function of the benefit [gained by local content and useful aggregation towars the content [like caches, and large networks building pipes to far-away places, and gaining nice aggregation]] and the cost. The cost is going down as competition increases. The benefit is going up as interesting technologies grow, and providers build larger international networks.