A bunch of businesses and nonprofits offer free wifi to their customers, and over time you build up a big enough blanket that pretty much anybody can walk into a coffee shop or library and check their email.
Tons of security risks, of course, but... I mean, I've used public wifi before during personal emergencies, and I was pretty grateful it existed. If you're gonna pick a comparison to be derisive with, maybe don't pick something that's widely useful and appreciated?
Comcast has even turned this into a selling point (I think somewhat unethically) by turning all of their customer access points into semi-public routers for other customers. It actually seems to scale pretty well.
Comcast provides its wifi by allowing you to connect to any other customer's router. (Roughly) a mesh network provides its wifi by allowing you to connect to any of the other nodes within the mesh.
What's your point? Is the money/infrastructure less legitimate because it was donated? Is the public wifi down at the library fundamentally worse because its cost wasn't bundled into the price of a coffee?
Hardware is hardware. If it works, who cares where it came from?