To power the IPv6 networks of refridgerators, ovens, and light switches, as well as your 3G video conferencing phone
None of these applications have any requirement for peering every 100km2. I'd expect my refrigerator, oven, light switches, etc. to be behind my house's firewall and only talk using link-local addresses anyways.
Do you know how much traffic the high resolution MPEG4 video/audio stream from an oven uses!? Why on earth would a network operator want to haul that kind of traffic hundreds of kilometers when 99.5 % of it is going to a 3G mobile phone in the same city. Remember that this video stream from the oven is going to be carry far more data than the phone can handle so that the mobile phone operator can provide a zoom-in application that allows the customer to zoom in on a hotspot on the surface of the turkey to better evaluate whether to switch the oven from roast to broil. Oh, BTW, ask someone at Cisco to explain to you how firewalls work. Their purpose is security, not reduction in PPS or bps. People in general will communicate a lot more with other people who live nearby no matter what the communications medium. Therefore it is likely that as the Internet becomes a commonplace everyday tool for commonplace everyday communications, the vast majority of the traffic will be relatively local. And while there may be some technical gurus who believe in the purity of running a few mega peering points, over the long haul, the customers of networks will reject this kind of centralized system in the same way that they are rejecting every other form of centralized control. --Michael Dillon