I've been quickly testing the Amazon EC2 bandwidth capabilities. Here are the results:

From amazon availability zone us-east-1c to New York:

• download speed: 7255 KB/s
• upload speed: 2167 KB/s
• ping: 7 ms

From amazon availability zone us-east-1c to San Fransisco:

• download speed: 1899 KB/s
• upload speed: 759 KB/s
• ping: 138 ms

To compare these results, here are some tests done at my swiss university:

From EPFL to New York:

• download speed: 1130 KB/s
• upload speed: 479 KB/s
• ping: 109 ms

From EPFL to San Fransisco:

• download speed: 682 KB/s
• upload speed: 201 KB/s
• ping: 377 ms