Universities and research institutes are also connected to private peering links such as ESNet[1] or Internet2[2]. This is actually a huge benefit because these links are typically uncongested and you can get much more reliable transmission on them (and hence consistent latency and faster transfer speeds). Other countries/continents also have their own private academic networks that peer with the US ones.

I think I read somewhere that they are upgrading the ESNet backbone to be 100Gbit/s and GEANT's[3] to be 1000 Gbit/s, so I wouldn't immediately write off University/academic networking as automatically inferior to Google's.

Honestly it's hard to tell without knowing any of the details of how much capacity Google is provisioning in Kansas City (and how much contention there is). How much backbone fiber is laid to KS/MO - it doesn't seem to be where existing big-scale connectivity is (unlike say, DC Metro area where a ton of datacenters are located or London/Paris/Amsterdam).

[1] http://www.es.net/ [2] http://www.internet2.edu/ [3] http://www.geant.net/pages/home.aspx

I'm not sure if it's true or not, but when I went to school there, the OIT people bragged that GT had the second fastest internet connection to the Pentagon.