Point-to-point 1Gbit microwave equipment from Ubiquiti is within the price range of an avid consumer - about the same cost as a nice, but hobbyist grade 3D prin

Point-to-point 1Gbit microwave equipment from Ubiquiti is within the price range of an avid consumer - about the same cost as a nice, but hobbyist grade 3D printer. It's likely that anyone who wanted to operate a major server would be tied in to the network by one or two 1+gbps links, and probably colocating with other servers, allowing them to share the overhead of this, and have several connections operating to the network in parallel, lowering the stress on any one route. Similarly, a lot of traffic is aggressively cached now to mitigate the need to hit the server with an identical request. There's no reason to think that certain kinds of content wouldn't be cached at various points in the mesh, making the total traffic to any particular server lower still. A realistic scenario for a datacenter is that 50-100 people split the cost of having 10 1+gbps links to the network, hitting it at multiple points well spread in the network. The inside of the data center would do some routing to handle the load balancing. I expect the total cost of that would be about $35k to set up, but splitting it between that many people, each person is paying (on average, for 50 to 100 people) between $350 and $700 - well within a reasonable amount for a coop to set up a datacenter. Further, $35k is a small enough price tag that it would be acceptable for a business (or a couple businesses) to share such a datacenter themselves, if there were a particular incentive for them to operate as part of a community mesh, rather than with the current internet. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-AF24-Airfiber-Wireless-Complete/dp/B00A51ZOQ4/ http://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-AF24-Airfiber-Wireless-Comple... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-AF-5-airFiber-5GHz-Wireless/dp/B00JID5EQU http://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-AF-5-airFiber-5GHz-Wireless/d...