That's a loaded and subjective statement - care to back it up?
Do a google search for the subject of my post - it's the application of CS to Science and Engineering, without being specific to the particular sci/eng field.
Um, all the world lives in one area code, do they?
Use more WAPs and adjust the TX power down - then you can have greater density.
Run your favourite 3rd party firmware on it (openwrt, dd-wrt, tomato, whatever) - it's specs are pretty awesome for the bucks. 128M Ram, 32M flash, two usb ports, N wireless, 480Mhz Broadcom/MIPS cpu (~twice as fast as most others).
I use crashplan - it's free as in beer... cross platform and does "to disk" backups - either to a local disk or a disk on a remote system. It does data de-duplication, compression, encryption and only backs up thing that have changed.
www.crashplan.com
8 Catfish = 1 Octo-puss