I believe these were introduced previously to solve a problem that we're
no longer dealing with; specifically, if I remember correctly, we
introduced these to deal with how we were going to implement a trait.
However, they don't appear to be necessary any more, so we're going to
get rid of them, so we won't need to deal with them any longer.
This induces an added `Send` in the Network trait and its
implementations, but provides us the ability to use standard functions
with obvious extensions. So that's nice. I've also added some additional
testing to sanity check the conversions.
