In the BBS days, the bar was higher to getting online. Some technical knowledge was required, and there were extra costs. I'd like to know the modern day equivalent.

I would be interested in seeing some sort of mesh network become popular, completely separate from "The Internet", with completely different protocols and paradigms, that you could access and participate in, just by sticking an antenna on your roof, plugging in some kind of adapter, and running some software.

Or perhaps you could utilize existing Wifi hardware and run a completely different set of protocols on it.