Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Michael Tharp <gxti AT partiallystapled.com>]

Magnus wrote:
> I don't believe for a minute that one cooperative is going to cover
> everything from Hillsborough to Pittsboro to Wake Forest and everything
> nearby.  Rather each town handling their own last-mile network
> (potentially peering into a meta-cooperative, who knows)

This is absolutely key. Zero-cost peering would allow bittorrent and
other peer-to-peer solutions to thrive as a content delivery mechanism
since there's no whining from upstream providers who have to foot the
bill for their overbooked bandwidth. The hard part will be connecting to
a backbone, where all the servers live, which won't be cheap;
residential connections are extremely asymmetric since normal people
don't have a lot of use for upload.

This topic has come up several times in the past few months on TriLUG
and now INW, so I'm beginning to believe it might just be crazy enough
to work. It's a bit of a pipe dream (pun intended), but hey, somebody
has to try it or we'll never know!

-- m. tharp