EMP in the high atmosphere?

As long as there is no phone/device in that network outside Iraq that will not work for Internet. If there is, the ISP/Government can fingerprint the traffic and block the IP of any device outside Iraq. Just like how China FW block VPN traffic.

edit: Adding China FW

Well, you don't send it in.. you just bring it in? Like something smuggled physically? Its slow, admitted, but better having that data come in on some truck driver-smuggled-ssd and reach you by hopping from phone to phone, then not at all.

How does that work across oceans? There's a severe lack of mesh nodes on the high seas and all high-bandwidth links across the ocean highly centralized in just a couple of companies.

Also, most people would definitely not appreciate their personal devices being hijacked as a mesh network for their neighbors teen watching tiktoks or whatever. Any such zero day exploit would be patched pretty quickly.

Well aiport traveling nodes connect across the oceans regularly. You can even predict that travel and make it a sort of routing announcement.

Example: Guy living in NY on the regular, traveling once a year to cuba and back. So somebody with a message to cuba, passes it along - it rides to the airport, and hops from a employee cellphone to the guy boarding his holiday plane. Add the transmission software being a virus for plausible deniability..

Gotta ask again: how much GB of storage on their phone do you think the average air traveler would be willing to donate to people so that their transoceanic fellows would be able to watch tiktoks from their homeland? How about porn? And given that GP seemed to dream of communications uncensorable by governments, how long would it be until a mandatory phone scan would be required before boarding a flight? For that matter, why would a government like Iran or North Korea even let phones into their country without a thorough cleansing of non-sanctioned information beforehand?

I'm all for balancing the power of governments with the power of their citizens but mesh networks have so many practical downsides that they are just Not The Way tbh.

GB? This is textmessages and pictures only.. So 0.1 Gb? Its unattractive for porn by default - to slow, to unreliable, but for messages that could never get there the other way.. its okay.