Something like this would work great in an urban environment if enough apps used it. For non-urban environments the wifi range becomes a limiting factor. I'm

Something like this would work great in an urban environment if enough apps used it. For non-urban environments the wifi range becomes a limiting factor. I'm hoping that LTE Direct becomes a thing, since it has a much higher range. Kind of a separate idea, but if the hardware ever became cheap enough, it'd be great if the charger that shipped with these "LTE Direct" phones also included an LTE chip so that it could participate in the mesh. It would be great for disasters and also for overloaded network That way you'd have a decent chance in a suburb to be able to have a no-data-plan-necessary mesh network for devices of preteens or other minor uses where paying for a data plan is too expensive. For example, a data connection for your entertainment system in your car. In order to connect such a mesh to the Internet without having to worry about being the origin of someone else's traffic, the base stations would connect over wifi to their home access point. All traffic would be relayed over the Internet to the user's own base station, which would then send it to the destination. That way the mesh doesn't have to have a lot of traffic but someone can connect to the mesh without becoming the point of origin for potentially malicious traffic. It also would reduce the load on the mesh since traffic would only travel one or two hops.