Funny, seems everyone in this thread thinks they are some type of networking guru, bet most can't even state what the OSI Layers are from 1 - 7 without looking them up. Internet is not the problem here it's the network, internet is just a bunch of protocols in the layer 4 environment such as TCP, UDP, TFTP,FTP,SNMP,IGMP,HTTP, HTTPS, SSH, etc.
To understand how a network really works you have to understand how the different layers operate with one another. For instance, distance while a problem is not that big of one, the problem comes with the amount of HOPS it takes to get to a particular destination, the more hops the more delay hence more latency. You can live 5 miles from a server farm and still have bad latency if your ISP routing tables suck.