BC.NET, a project of the British Columbia provincial government, is deploying what they call Transit Exchange Hubs in communities throughout the province.
The Transit Exchange Hub is similar in concept to the MSAP (Multimedia Services Access Point), which I designed and implemented in 1999 as part of the Blacksburg Electronic Village. Both the Hubs and the MSAP build on a standard piece of Internet systems architecture called a NAP, or Network Access Point. What NAPs do is allow different networks (remember that the Internet is a network of networks, not a single contiguous thing) to exchange data.
What is different about the MSAP/Transit Exchange approach is that it pushes the NAP down into communities and regions. The benefits can be dramatic--network performance can increase substantially and the cost of intracommunity network traffic can go down significantly. So MSAPs reduce costs and improve network performance. For local applications that are sensitive to time delays like videoconferencing, voice telephone calls, or gaming, the MSAP can be critical to performance and usability by keeping local data local and not requiring Internet Service Providers to haul large amounts of data across their very expensive Internet backbone connections.