Comment by woah

I participated in community mesh networks for years and even did a startup where people could get paid for installing mesh nodes on their roof. Many others have done this as well over many years, and have either pivoted (Meraki) or gone out of business and sold their assets to conventional ISPs (Common Networks).

The biggest hurdle is that reliably running high performance transmitters is not easy for amateurs, and the payoff for any one transmitter is not that much. I'm going to use the example of a residential ISP but this applies to cell networks as well. The "meshier" the network is, the more people revenue needs to be split between, exacerbating the problem.

Another issue is that reliability is extremely important for internet access. Given the fact that amateurs are not going to be able to maintain high uptime, for a decentralized mesh network to succeed at actually providing internet service, you need to have a lot of redundancy in any given area, further reducing income from any one node.

The solution to this is to have a team of technicians that can go around and fix and optimize nodes as soon as there is any problem. This is basically what an ISP or cell carrier does. An added difference is that in a mesh network, the idea is generally that the property owner owns the node, while with a conventional ISP, the property owner leases to the ISP who owns the node. Property owners generally prefer the latter, since this is the model they are used to operating under as landlords.