If your criteria for "getting anywhere significant" is to be even within two orders of magnitude as performant as the current internet, then you are correct. If however the aim is to build a distributed, no single point of failure/control, kbps-class, backup communications system, that's primarily community-based, and that is NOT controlled by any corporation, ISP, or government, then there are many such networks already in existence. They're based on wifi, and completely legal. Clearly they're hobby projects but that doesn't make them uninteresting or indeed, potentially extremely useful in low-delta scenarios of societal breakdown and/or centralised oppression.
I'm not talking about bandwidth, I'm talking about coverage alone. Berlin for example are many people that are into Freifunk and such networks. There are many more people into technology and the culture and politics associated with it. Nevertheless they can't even get decent coverage.
The network is worthless not because it works badly, they fail to create an accessible one to begin with.
I rest my case. There is demand for such a thing even if it's far from perfect. Not everybody is willing to trust the increasing encroachment by the authorities into the mainline internet. They're willing to experiment to ensure that technologies are being worked on that permit independence from potential authoritarianism (corporate or government).
