But if you look at trunks going into *another* country the same report comes to this ranking.

London Paris New York Amsterdam Frankfurt

This report also says that the relevance of US for Internet is decreasing.

Well, yeah. Interregional Internet bandwidth: connects between world regions. Based on aggregate sum, New York is most significant metro. International Internet bandwidth: connects between countries. Based on aggregate sum, London is most significant metro. (Hint: Europe has all those border-crossing fiber rings.) Relevance of US for [global] Internet: decreasing. Region-to-region traffic still goes mostly through US, but in most regions, historical trend is for country-to-country traffic to stay in-region more often, eg more intraregional links in Asia (7 percent of its aggregate international Internet bandwidth at mid-1999, 13 percent at 2000, 18 percent at 2001). Not particularly earthshattering news, but perhaps interesting. Definitions: http://www.telegeography.com/products/books/pg/faq.html

As ever: never trust a statistic unless you faked it yourself ...

Yup. But if people put enough time and (properly-directioned) effort into their fakes, they can end up with something distinctly usable for a limited set of applications. Statistics are a trade-off. cheers Bram --