Others have answered your question, so here’s some more detail.
The vast majority of your traffic on the internet doesn’t travel very far. Website providers have set it up this way deliberately to improve your service. You get a faster response and better connection if the video file you are streaming on Youtube is on a server 100 miles away than if it’s 1,000 miles away. So they have built geographic distribution centers that service most internet traffic without having to communicate too far away. You have to really look around and almost be deliberate to generate traffic that will cross one of the cables in the ocean.
And it’s this way for most internet users in the developed world. I’m in the U.S. If I try to visit the website for the BBC (England) my request for their website is handled by a regional server in the U.S. that was set up by the BBC for that purpose. They send updates for the website to the U.S. server through the international cables, but the U.S. visitor traffic stays on land in America.
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