Latency and the Evolution of Transport
Some of my sites are hosted in Kansas City,MO which is a common location for many large data centers in the US, Kansas is a popular place for building data centers because it provides equal network latency for both east and west cost clients due to its central location (latency depends on the length of the actual link, i.e. how long is the transmitting optical fiber cable).
Kansas City was initially built because of the strategic confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers that provided good steam ship transport through the Mississippi-Missouri river.
Kansas City 1869
Being a large population center on the river it had one of the first major railroad bridges across the Missouri which made the city a major south to north east to west railroads hub
Once the optical fiber network infrastructure used by the core of today’s Internet was build, the public land of the railroad grid has been utilised for laying out the cables making it the new communication highway, Kansas once again became a major network/data center hub (all of this because the same bridge on the same old river..)
(source: colocationmontreal.com).
I am currently running most of my response time and web latency tests from Dallas and Kansas which provides extremely reliable results giving the infrastructure and location of those data centers.