[logfromblammo]

Everyone run some fiber to your nearest neighbor in each of the 4 cardinal directions. Go to MIT, find one or more of the kids that already figured out to make all that work, and read their theses. Launch an open-source project for the required network hardware and its firmware, and manage to sell as many as you can produce at $30 each.

My pipe dreams are about a series of tubes.

[wmf]

A five-port gigabit fiber router sounds more like $300 in volume, and most Americans would rather pay $299/month than $300 one time because it's cheaper.

[justizin]

this is how all networks work. there are no special MIT theses. get an ASN and use BGP.

Fiber hardware at $30 each is probably not happening, since we barely get ethernet hardware in that price range, and certainly not of any quality.

[logfromblammo]

I was actually referring to the [implied] part where the person installing it doesn't need to know anything other than how to plug everything in. You're not going to get a usable network out of this if it requires the people using it to know anything at all about their hardware, or if they have to get their own identifying numbers from ICANN.

It really needs to be something where they plug in a box and hot and cold running Internet comes out when they open the faucets. And if you thought disruptions were bad when some country "misconfigures" their BGP to route the entire Internet through their spy agency's offices for 15 minutes, wait until a thousand Joe Bagadonuts are doing it truly accidentally, all the time.