I have a similar idea for one day when we can actually use the government for good again. We should build a low bandwidth nationwide digital radio network. Not owned by corporations but by the people. Include things like rtk capability by default. The telecomms and isps will try to fight this with billions of inflation dollars, but if we do manage to get this in, everyone could have access to the internet at low speeds without paying, and it would be relativly easy to maintain. An open standard that would allow many cool technologies like robotics that are much safer and precise.
Potential aplications are, nonsibscription medical devices, realtime rtk everywhere, a huge boon for construction with a standard coordinate system. Documenting things like underground cables and pipes easily. Property lines. Self driving cars that can communicate with each other and work together. Access to the internet and communications for the poor. Cheap animal tracking collars. Drones that can fly across the country without needing a data plan. So many things. It would be an efficency gain accross the entire economy.
Unless you are running a mesh node or joining the global supercompute cluster, you wouldnt need to run any hardware. I more mean like a network of towers run by the state using sub 1000 MGHz freqiencies or soemthing, to get good range, maybe even lower frequencies. You could maybe get like 50+ mile range with small devices at low power if you had the right spectrum. Perhaps a fallback mode of several hundred miles for low speed mode.