For example, it seems reasonable that I could have my laptop or phone use a ssh tunnel and it can only go to my wireless router. The router will only accept SSH traffic with a certificate and route traffic to an SSH somewhere on my wired network, or from the router itself.
At work I do something similar. I setup a firefox profile (firefox -ProfileManager -no-remote) to use SOCKS proxy on some port and setup SSH to connect to an EC2 instance I have lying around (ssh -i cert.file [email protected] -ND 8888). This way I can browse sort of in private. :p
FYI: Some sites like craigslist or redfin reject ec2 traffic.
I wanted to comment on your ec2 traffic observation and make you aware of Digital Ocean machines if you were not already aware. Not only are they inexpensive but D.O. offers quite a few egress points from their data centers. I also believe that their hosts have individual public IP addresses, which may help further reduce the chance of being blocked wholesale.
Granted, the IP addresses are still clearly identifiable as D.O. machines, so if those services want to filter out "data center traffic" they still can but you might fly under the radar as compared to EC2 traffic.
A great reason to use wired when you can!