“When you lose all basic communications in a disaster, people don’t care about watching YouTube, but they do want to be able to send short text messages and say, ‘I’m trapped in a building,’” said Matthew Pearl, an attorney affiliated with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University who has studied emergency-related communication tools. “The design and resilience of mesh networks allow you to do that quickly and with relative ease.”

Source: The Rebirth of Mesh Networks | Risk Management