Over WAN will work, but not sure how reliable will be. Regards.
BDR is asynchronous multi-master, without global transaction management etc.
XL is a distributed database with global transaction management, strong consistency, etc.
Say you have geographically distributed application (managing customers in US, EU, ...). You can deploy a node in each area and direct local users to this node with low latency etc. It also means "no conflicts" (which is a major concern in multi-master), and the changes will asynchronously replicate to the other nodes.
XL would perform poorly in this scenario (at least I believe so), and it's meant more for local deployments, when hitting vertical scalability limits.
It's fast enough to not notice delays for users. As in, have a user log in on host1, switch the user to host2 and the session is there.
Disclaimer, we're not write heavy and have around one hundred active users.