Found a couple cool maps showing Internet bandwidth on a global scale. Here is one from 2005:

The striking thing shown here is how much the States are a bottleneck for the rest of the world. We have a nice pipeline to Europe and another to Asia, but there’s no pipeline between Europe and Asia… at least nothing comparable to the one created by the US. And thus we have created a star topology. Probably the worst that could have happened to a global structure, but that’s what we have. Here’s another map (although I don’t believe it’s quite as recent) that shows a similar statistic:

And as an added bonus, here’s a diagram showing peering over the Internet. The US is on the bottom, Europe on the upper right and Asia on the upper left: