If the Washington router were to go down then data may still be able to make it to and from its destination using alternate paths. If you are connected to small local ISP and you wish to access a World Wide Web page on a computer connected to the MCI backbone in Oregon, your request would travel to Chicago and then directly to Oregon. If someone wished to access a Web page on the large local ISP and they were connected to the small local ISP their request would travel to Chicago then to Washington then to Virginia and finally to the computers at the large local ISP site. Although the computer hosting the Web pages may be just down the street you are confined to taking this roundabout path due to the way the connections are laid out. Even though this seems highly inefficient it does not necessarily mean that it must be slow.
Data can travel quite rapidly through high performance connections even over thousands of miles.
Although I used Web pages as an example of data sent over the Internet this same principle applies to all Internet services. Telnet, Gopher, FTP and all of the other possible uses of Internet connections consist at the basic level as just packets of data. Packets are packets, and so they all move through the Internet according to rules of traffic and the connections between computers. However, they do have an IP address or Internet Protocol address that accompanies each and every one of them. This address is read by routers as the packet comes in.