[wisty]

If you had an antenna and an omni, though, you could connect a local subnet to the wider area. If you had a few directional antennas in each local subnet (say, an apartment complex connected by omnis), then the subnets would connect to the rest of the world.

Wireless meshes don't work. They need to be fractal - local omnis, then cantennas, then backbones. If every geek had a cantenna (plus an omni to connect to the non-geeks, and another geek with a cantenna), you could light up most cities (OK, maybe not quite a city ... I don't really know). From there, you need some super-geeks finding ways to connect the city nets (private fiber?), but you don't need many super-geeks.

[pyre]

Isn't the problem with this, single points of failure? I guess it's still more of a mesh than the current infrastructure. But if you're trying to 'route around the government,' then having a defined structure seems counter to your goals.

[wisty]

A full mesh is impossible. It just doesn't scale. You need a fractal system. You also need graceful degradation (or progressive enhancement). It would be great to push a tweat out, and have it visible on the local network until the local network can sync with the central server.