[CaptainHaplo]

A decade ago, most global traffic went through the US. European to Far Eastern traffic for example. Nowadays, that has changed somewhat, though we are a pass through for alot of the data. As for how many entry/exit nodes exist - its ALOT in today's world. Because over the ocean data in both directions goes by satellite, the number of nodes with "orbital" capability has jumped by orders of magnitudes. Theoretically, every person that gets their internet by satellite is such a node, because the satellite itself does no routing, but instead is simply a "signal repeater" in a sense. I don't know about Europe, but alot of US citizens access the internet via satellite (though the overall percentage would be small).

You can't use traceroute to find how many nodes, because different routers may use different routing protocols. Without getting technical, some use the "least # of hops" to the destination to figure out the path, while others use "fastest path" (which in theory are the same but in reality are not), while still others may use a static route - meaning data can only go to a limited number of other routers. It gets really convoluted once you start thinking that each router you hit may change the path your data takes because the next router may be set to pass that data in a different manner.

If your really interested in this stuff, look up the following:

Rip / Rip II
OSPF (Open Shortest Path First)
IGRP (Interior Gateway Routing Protocol)
BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)
EGP (External Gateway Protocol)

Don't be suprised if most of what you find is technical in nature. If you really want to dig and learn in the networking field, the best thing I could suggest without spending a ton of money would be looking into openly available network training documents.