It is indeed hard to say how useful is to know hop counts when a large fraction of IXP member are remote and plenty of content is cached, but that question was bugging me too and I have been looking into it. From what we could see, pretty stable around 5 hops.

Disclaimer this is an ongoing work. Feedback welcome!

On Thu, Nov 22, 2018 at 7:33 PM Keith Medcalf <kmedcalf@dessus.com> wrote:

>> I'd argue that's just content (though admittedly a lot of it).

"just static content" would be more accurate ...

>I would further argue that you can't cache active Web content, like
>bank account statements, utility billing, help desk request/responses,
>equipment status, and other things that change constantly.

There were many attempts at this by Johhny-cum-lately ISPs back in the 90's -- particularly Telco and Cableco's -- with their "transparent poxies". Eventually they discovered that it was more cost efficient to actually provide the customer with what the customer had purchased.

---
The fact that there's a Highway to Hell but only a Stairway to Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic volume.

>-----Original Message-----
>From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Stephen
>Satchell
>Sent: Wednesday, 21 November, 2018 20:45
>To: nanog@nanog.org
>Subject: Re: Internet diameter?
>
>On 11/21/2018 07:32 PM, Ross Tajvar wrote: