[acidburnNSA]

As a fellow ham, I have to say: guys, guys... it's ham, not HAM. Other than that I totally agree with you.

The (VHF and UHF) ham bands will send data a few tens of kilometers with good messaging bandwidth. Here in Seattle there's a Monday-night digital net through a repeater on the Columbia tower where folks send text messages and some (slow) photos on 444.55 MHz. Typical speeds are like 9600 baud.

As you mention, when you go down to the HF bands like 20m you can transmit and receive around the world, but there's far less bandwidth. The tragedy of the commons is right on.

I've operated PSK31 (which runs at 31 baud) worldwide on 20m and it's pretty much a chatroom. You can get a lot said with that, but you certainly won't be browsing the web.

It would be cool to play around with connecting 2.4 GHz local wifi meshnets with ham repeaters at ranges of say 50 km. Then you'd have nice fast local communication with reasonable long distance. .