https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/19/the-librerouter-project-aims-to-make-mesh-networks-simple-and-affordable/

In the city, we’re constantly saturated with the radio waves from 10 or 20 different routers, cell towers and other wireless infrastructure. But in rural communities there might only be one internet connection for a whole village. LibreRouter is a hardware and software project that looks to let those communities build their own modern, robust mesh networks to make the most of their limited connectivity.

The intended use case is in situations where, say, a satellite or wired connection terminates at one point, the center of an area, but the people who need to use it live nearby — but well outside the hundred feet or so you can expect a Wi-Fi signal to travel. Often in such a case it’s also prohibitively expensive to run more wires or install cellular infrastructure.