said by nitzan: Like if you're in France you can probably get 20mbps to a French or another European website - but if you try to hit a US-based website you'd get more like 2mbps.
Sorry, not true in France and I doubt it's true in most countries, although I've heard it may be a problem in Australia.
My connection in France is 8 megs max. We all know that translates to about 6 that you can count on most of the time. I download a lot of stuff like iTunes content and I manage servers in the USA. The speeds are not slower for the USA except on servers that can't handle it. Event then they're not less than 4 megs.
Further, most content is now put on edge servers such as Amazon S3 or Cloudburst and the big guys use Akamai. The distance isn't much of an issue these days.