[Stephen304]

Maybe this is a bit tangential, but speaking of alternative networks, there are some really cool projects like cjdns and yggdrasil, which can be used to create an "alternative internet". A group I am involved with are trying to use it to create a local mesh network, since it's technically trivial to provide access to the greater internet over the mesh. And since you can manually peer with other nodes using the existing internet, you can participate in the network without being located near any existing nodes (though that may be considered defeating the purpose, it's very helpful to join all the meshes together so mesh services are accessible to everyone).