Path length is dependent on where you stand and look at it all, of course.
If anyone knows of a place in which a border router is only one (or 1.1 average) hop away from every other network on the planet, please let me know what real estate prices are like there, though.
(I suspect the 1.1 figure measures something quite different - the average path length inside a CDN or similar, which probably should be closer to one but might involve sneaky things like an overlay network).
I would wager the 1.1 figure is "average path length from CDN to end user", and quite possibly weighted by bytes served.
Most of the major players in the space (Netflix, Akamai, YouTube, Facebook, etc) have boxes inside ISP networks across major metros, so the path length to reach those ISPs' users is in fact 1 assuming a cache hit, and the RTT is certainly less than 20ms.
If anyone knows of a place in which a border router is only one (or 1.1 average) hop away from every other network on the planet, please let me know what real estate prices are like there, though.
(I suspect the 1.1 figure measures something quite different - the average path length inside a CDN or similar, which probably should be closer to one but might involve sneaky things like an overlay network).