These are cool and all, but here's a naive question. Where do these community networks connect to the internet at large? Wouldn't this violate some sort of ToS from the provider?
There are many different realities regarding the connectivity from a community network to the rest of the Internet. In the case of AlterMundi - the organization steering LibreRouter - , the communities that are connected in our region in Argentina are registered as a national non-profit operator, we have our own ASN and public IP ranges and we do BGP peering with other networks in the region.
So... no ToS violations.
In general, those ToS would likely be struck down under precedent. Additionally, it's bad news for an ISP to cut off their low-cost, ethical competition that will only help your cause. Source: I built the internet backbone for this: https://www.nycmesh.net/. If your city is on this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_exchange_point, you can buy data center internet like we did. It runs about $1,000/mo and can serve about as many people (by over-selling the bandwidth 20X as is standard in industry).
Either fibre or wireless link(s) to an upstream provider. Non-residential connections don't have the same sort of ToS that residential broadband does.
The cost of those links (or link) is then shared by the community wireless organization. So typically, subscribers pay a small monthly fee to join the mesh, which covers the cost of Internet connectivity and any other shared resources in the community network (ie. rooftop space for a central node, etc).