I have a lot of experience with roofnet, Meraki and Open Mesh. They work to some extent, but not nearly with the degree of reliability that an ordinary customer

I have a lot of experience with roofnet, Meraki and Open Mesh. They work to some extent, but not nearly with the degree of reliability that an ordinary customer would tolerate. You are not going to get a reliable network with single-radio devices in an urban setting with lots of interference and construction materials that are not friendly to wireless signals. You can do somewhat better if you plan out your backhaul links using traditional, non-mesh technologies and only use mesh for the very last few hundred feet, and stick to dual-radio N devices. There is a lot of hype about some of these networks in Europe (Athens, Austria, Berlin, etc.) but what people fail to realize is that these networks are used by geeks who are happy to build their own antennas, mess around with a linux shell, etc. If you just hand people devices you're not going to have a network that is tolerable for most consumers. It may work okay in a developing country in the middle of a revolution where people are willing to hack something together, but for ordinary consumers who want a reliable connection and don't care about the underlying technology it just doesn't work.