I do agree that if communities want to be networked and govt do not want to let them, distributed small hubs is the way to go (and hope govt will not put real effort in against them).
At least if digital data transmission is a requirement. Btw, do you know if there are suitable commercial products for this kind of thing?
we had good long legs up to 35km, but that took effort. Far better to use short range mesh than depend on long range bottlenecks. Wifi is useful for short-leg mesh.