I don't expect it, but wouldn't it be cool to think that the Hydro planners would have the foresight to construct their meter-network as a peer-to-peer grid?

Ok, I've probably lost a lot of readers with that remark, but bear with me here ...

In 'POIS' (Plain Old Internet Service) you have an ISP connected to some fat pipe, connected to next-tier ISPs connected to fatter pipes and so on, and so on, and so on. It's a 'starburst' pattern, the occasional line out from a center exploding into a new starburst pattern, but the important and salient detail is how most rays ending in the single dots (that are me and you) start from a common and congested hub point.

In Peer-to-peer, the basic diagram is the same, except we draw billions of new fine lines connecting every endpoint you and me to every other you and me. With stronger lines for the peers nearby

In the POIS world, you order a movie trailer from Apple.com and it trundles down the track making turns at each starburst hub, avoiding the wrong turn in Albequerque, arriving at your modem door in a polite and orderly queue of bits.

In Peer-to-Peer, I get some, you get some, you see I have some you don't yet have, I see you have some I don't yet have, and the bits we exchange didn't need to come down the trunk-line pipe twice to feed us both. Then multiply that by the billions of me's and you's in our omni-connected diagram.

If Hydro was smart, and we all know the chances of that but can still dare to dream, these meter-nodes would know of their next-nearest meter-node, and bind together like a omni-directional bucket-brigade 'network grid'.

This is, some may remember, more or less what we had back in the pre-Internet days of FidoNet and UUCP, where thoughtful local community hubs would connect overnight to all their next-nearest neighbours to relay our emails and files. Sure, it's not as fast as top-tier fibre to the home, but it's cheap like borcht, fast enough, and best of all, there's no one single point of failure that craps out in a store ... or sends you a message two days ahead of discontinuing that line of business :)

Just a thought, a rememberance of another opportunity now long past: years ago while they were lobbying resident support for the Natural Gas pipelines through our neighbourhoods, and knowing how many US municipalities had leveraged that corporate-sponsored track-laying to piggy-back community-owned dark-fibre into the same trenches, I asked both the gas company and the municipality. Gas lines, you see, also need monitoring and are very often monitored by simply tagging an optic fibre along the pipe; if the pipe breaks, so does the signal, and the mirror-effect of the snap point lets engineers pinpoint the location to within a few angstroms. Pipeline fibre is a win-win partnership, a 'no brainer' as some MBAs are wont to say.

But, needless to say, it didn't happen. My queries produced blank stares and quick changes of the discussion subject, but boy, here now just a scant few years later, wouldn't it have been marvy to have Bell and Rogers both paying us for the right of way to reach our homes? And then, on top of that tidy sum we'd have oodles of residents and seasonal residents actually eager to pay the equivalent of ten times the water fee into the public coffers just to get a slice of that gigabit bandwidth under the sand.

I've missed my calling. I should be writing Science Fiction and Fantasy novels.

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