I've always wondered about this as well. Get independent hobbyists to setup micro wifi networks. Run all traffic through a vpn or some sort so the operator doesn't risk their IP/ISP banning their service. Monetize the whole thing on a pay as you go service. $1/gb and give 70 cents of that to the independent operators. The big telecoms already have these little mini-wifi networks in bigger cities that you can get access to but only if you are a subscriber to their services.
For me personally I would definitely pay the $1/gb to get access to such a network. Right now, I only use my cell data for e-mail and light web browsing. The cost of 3g/4g data is simply too expensive for me.
I pay $0.05 per GB or so at home ($60 per TB). I'd happily sell my data at a small profit just to offset whatever the equipment is that's required.
Someone else on this thread mentioned gotenna, which seemed like a similarly cool idea. Unfortunately they rejected the idea of allowing gotenna <-> internet <-> gotenna via a gateway I offered to write. They already have a unique id per device and I was going to use a DHT to allow all the gateways to track which user was behind which gateway. Seemed like a killer app to me, after all why limit who you message to being within 2-3 hops of you... why not allow the other few billion folks on the planet?
Sadly they wouldn't allow access to the underlying mesh meta data and instead required using their extremely limited API.
Having near free widgets that can mesh at low bandwidth (think SMS and IM like bandwidths) and then pay per GB for faster links seems like an excellent idea. I can imagine having phones/tablets without a $50 per month WAN charge if it could mesh and use wifi. Would be handy for sensor networks, home security, public safety monitoring (like cars going the wrong way on the highway), etc.
LoRa might enable this, and easily reaches 10-20km range (up to 100km in theory). A lot of projects in Europe experimenting with it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
Well the gotenna network is pretty slow, and internet is not particularly friendly to store and forward with high latencies. I was thinking more along the lines of sharing your location (like APRS) and SMS/IM type traffic. That way you could have cover a large area with minimal infrastructure.
But these people are always talk and theory, never a simple blueprint for a standardized design.
Guess it's always like this :( I'm not terribly impressed with the Tor organization either.
The public really needs a way to bypass these lying thieving carriers and these gubmint bullshit artists wanting to keep their jobs. But without some sort of credible leadership - such alternatives will never exist.
For me personally I would definitely pay the $1/gb to get access to such a network. Right now, I only use my cell data for e-mail and light web browsing. The cost of 3g/4g data is simply too expensive for me.