IDEA: We should create a new internet

Say you have 2 computers connected to a LAN, but you aren't connected to the internet on either of them. You are still able to transfer files between the computers easily. Now, if you were connected by a wireless router, any computer within the range of the wireless signal will be able to transfer files between each other. Then you decide to use a signal booster to increase the range of your wireless network so that you'll be able to share files with everyone in your neighborhood.

This is where my idea comes in. Internet connections usually cost money to maintain, you have to spend more to get more bandwidth and plus they are slower than direct LAN/WLAN connections. What if you were to give out signal boosters to people all over the city, and go on for every square-mile until your LAN can be accessed by millions of people? Hell, with strong enough signal boosters it should be theoretically possible to spread it all across North America. Everyone would be able to share files/folders with everyone else, WITHOUT needing access to the internet. IP addresses can't even be used to track down because it's a network without internet access, your IP address would not be associated with any ISP.

Download speeds would be amazing, they would only be limited by the strength of the wireless signal, so in any urban area you'd never get speeds lower than 10MB/s. At first it would just be like a P2P program where you'd download files from other people's shared folders, but then websites would not cost anything to host because it's just a matter of putting your website in a shared folder and leaving your computer on.

Fuck, everything about this sounds awesome. The only downside I could see of this is that being connected to the same network leaves everyone's computers wide open to hackers... who gives a shit, I want to try this. I wonder how much money it would cost to start out and get enough of a signal to cover a few blocks.

op here. Well, there's finally some valid arguments I didn't think of.

So in order for this to work the way I imagined, it's not enough to have wireless repeaters set up on every street block but also to have multiple wireless routers set up all over so that they all act as access points to the same network, to allow for an unlimited amount of connections. Theoretically, if everyone in the world had a router all acting as access points to one single network, there would be virtually no limit how many people can connect at once and the speed would not drop at all.

The way I imagine this would work would be that people would all have to chip in and pay a 1-time fee for a router so that the network can be extended more and more. It would take a lot of advertising to get started, the fact is it's still much more preferable to paying a monthly fee for internet access with low speeds and limited bandwidth.