Starting up service in a single community with WiMax or Cellular can cost up to $1 million for spectrum licenses, tower location rights and tower leasing fees. A tower typically covers a 5 mile service radius (75+ square miles). But when more than a thousand subscribers are served by a single tower, the tower's capacity usually becomes significantly congested. Adding more towers is very difficult because communities typically oppose the addition of more towers as unsightly in addition to the fact that towers are extremely expensive not to mention the cost of dealing with municipal governments in thousands of communities. In addition, physical obstacles such as hills and foliage often block transmission between a subscriber and a tower. So as tower based services become more successful, service quality, availability, and speed and throughput typically deteriorate seriously. Because of it's unique network architecture, SkyPipes can cover equivalet service areas for much less cost and subscribers will experience no loss in performance as the number of subscribers increases.

The ability to offer service to an initially sparse base of subscribers and to expand gracefully to a dense base of subscribers is extremely important for the economic well-being of independent service providers. Unlike large incumbent providers, independents typically don't have the capital reserves available to spend large amounts of money "up-front" to open up new markets for their services. Also, independents often serve many small communities that are widely separated from one another. This makes the high community start-up costs of other approaches economically untenable.

At the other extreme, success (having lots of subscribers) often cripples other wireless network approaches because of the fundamental traffic capacity limitations of their network architectures. As more radio nodes are added to ordinary WiFi mesh networks each added radio becomes a de facto source of interference to every other radio node in its vicinity that it is not directly communicating with. SkyPipes avoids this by dynamically focusing its beams only at specific clusters of radios to which traffic is being momentarily directed. Unlike Anchor Points, towers are too costly and too objectionable to residents to locate large numbers of them them closer to subscriber neighborhoods. So because each tower must therefore serve larger numbers of subscribers, traffic congestion quickly compromises the service quality and availability provided by a single tower. SkyPipes maximizes network capacity by providing more low cost Anchor Points and by dynamically adjusting the power transmitted by each of its Anchor Point and subscriber relay nodes to just the amount required to reach the receiving node with a perfect signal. So when SkyPipes subscribers are very close to each other, there is little to no interference produced for any other nodes in the area. In a SkyPipes network each subscriber will typically receive from 15 to 20 times as much throughput (speed) as would be available from either a tower based or mesh network.