Don,
You are missing the whole point - Not everyone needs to run BGP, or have a datacenter, they just need to find a border node who does and VPN/Tunnel to it. It's called cooperation.
Those who can provide a BGP border node, can 'advertise' through this list or portal.ampr.org that fact and how to get setup to tunnel/VPN to them. Like I said some of these routers have 'unlimited' support for VPN/Tunnel clients. You can also tier this architecture. A single border router might be supporting 20 /16 VPNs/Tunnels to tier 2 routers, those routers might support 30 smaller subnets and so on ---
There are some peering points that are relatively inexpensive (or free) and some individuals are in a position to be generous. This is no different than the FM repeater operator who pays for a site, equipment, and power costs to benefit a community of users, who may or may not make donations to that cost.
Right now the total traffic on 44net could probably ride on a single home broadband connection.
http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Interface/Gre
The VPNs can be full up using available protocols MikroTik runs a variety of VPN protocols PPTP, L2TP, IPIP, ... Cisco has DMVPN -- you just have to find a common one between two routers.
I run my personal /24 (non-44net) over a VPN 24x7 and have several hosts, including D-STAR gateways running over it.
http://www.seattleix.net/rules.htm ________________________________ John D. Hays K7VE PO Box 1223, Edmonds, WA 98020-1223