Imagine that your data has to hop through dozens of cheap consumer routers with unreliable links to reach its destination. You could easily end up with multi-se

Imagine that your data has to hop through dozens of cheap consumer routers with unreliable links to reach its destination. You could easily end up with multi-second latencies, making the network useless for most applications. Then you would try to fix that by putting some high-performance traffic exchange nodes with longer distance links in your network. Perhaps arrange them into hierarchies... Wait, that's how the internet already works. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering#Modern_peering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering#Modern_peering