Well, I had a scheme a while back to get away completely from this sort of stuff, sort of.

The idea was a roof-top (router) box with up to 8 directional ‘couplers’ that would connect with your neighbors, at 100Mbs or higher on each of the 8 directions (and probably gig-e or faster down to the house). 

That would tie you and your neighbors together.  You go together and share a fat pipe to the rest of the world, but as each neighborhood does this, they connect to THEIR neighbors and so forth, until the majority of traffic can go rooftop to rooftop, avoiding the standard path entirely.

Yes, there are some (LARGE J) latency issues and the routing table could get very interesting, but the hardware is ready now…

Oh, well, it never got off the ground.

Rusty