> And in order to be of any real value, at least one of those mesh network nodes needs a connection to the real Internet.
I don't know what this means. If all of my family and friends are on a private network, and I'm serving my copy of Wikipedia, and all of us are sharing our books, movies, and music, we have a bulletin board, voice and video chat...
How did you get your copy of Wikipedia? How do you update your copy of Wikipedia?
How do you get your books, movies, and music? How do you get new ones?
Yes, it has real value as a fill-in-the-gap until you can reconnect to the real internet. Long term I guess it still has some value as a way to look at a static collection of things (plus content generated by people on the mesh), but the real internet is much more valuable.