Backbone, Scott. Backbone. You, Sprint, PSI, Alternet, Net-99, etc. All the rest of the world's providers are getting transit from some backbone. If all the transit backbones are in the area the problem is merely political.
They aren't... ICM, Pipex, and Dante to name three. Sprintlink may play nice and handle ICM, what do you plan to do to address the others?
How do Pipex and Dante get global routes right now?
And for the next trick, how do you scale your solution to the next site? Does your solution require sites of all the backbone providers to be at each metropolitan exchange? Doesn't this put a limit in the number of providers that can do this?
More likely, it limits the number of areas you can apply this idea cleanly to. Poorly-connected areas won't get such blocks. The more backbones in an area, the easier (technically and politically) to put such a block there. The question is how much you get out of the areas we can do this to... which could be quite a lot. Just the SF Bay Area is a large chunk of the Internet as a whole... it won't be forever, but it is now and its growth patterns could positively or negatively shape how other areas grow later. -george