My question is, are those Hong Kong users getting 1Gbps access to the internet or a small portion of the internet located within 5 miles of their position? If I had a server in Japan, would they be able to connect at 1Gbps? If I had a server in San Francisco?
I know that when I was in Israel a few months back, access to major sites like Facebook was terribly slow even over a connection that was fast when tested using Speedtest.net to a server within Israel (even accounting for latency).
If that's the case, would you want/accept an American ISP who offered you 100Mbps access to servers within your metro area and much slower speeds to the greater internet? For example, in Boston we have the Northern Crossroads (http://www.nox.org/background/index.html) and my ISP could probably easily and cheaply give me very high speed access to servers within it, but that's a tiny fraction of the servers that I'd want to use since, as an English speaker, the servers I'd want to connect to are very spread out. If they moved the bottleneck to 2 hops out, would that be helpful? Would you accept them selling you 100Mbps or 1Gbps internet service that was actually 10Mbps to the greater internet and only that fast to servers nearby? I'm really just musing here and am really interested in people's thoughts on the matter.
Hopefully someone who knows about the situation (like where ISPs costs are, whether it costs more for an ISP to get/build capacity to go across the country for me, whether it's significantly cheaper for my ISP to deliver higher speeds to a nearby server, etc.) can speak to this.