[cookiengineer]

As others pointed out I also think that satellite connections are the wrong tech here.

How about a wifi meshing phone that is made for reaching wifis much farther away in distance?

Maybe partner with wigle to have available wifis in your local area?

If you have a wifi card that is 3x2 or 4x2, you can also use one antenna for peering purposes. One antenna has to be constantly scanning while moving though, so I guess that needs a lot of power...but maybe it's still feasible!?

Network infrastructure wise wifi has a lot of benefits, if you also offer something like a raspberry pi image I'm sure people would love to help build up the meshnet. Maybe you can also hook up on Apple's network similar to how their AppleTags work.

[solardev]

Mesh networks are a thing, but 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz aren't great carrying signals long distances or over the horizon. They're only really practical in densely populated areas, which tend to have wifi and cell already. Useful in mass protests and stadiums, maybe, but not so much out in the country...

WiMax can help a bit, but those have powerful stationary transmitters.

Fundamentally I don't think it's so much the particularly transmission scheme used that matters here, but just the amount of power it takes to send data over distance when it's not relayed by a stationary base station.