The same principles are used and airwaves are just another physical medium. The problems are this is shared media with everyone else and also it's somewhat inefficient media (EDIT: and noisy).
Your hypothetical high powered handheld transmitter (e.g. you cellphone?) is limited by the amount of power from your batteries and other factors.
EDIT: The bandwidth of radio waves is also limited and there's noise which limits the total amount of data you can broadcast.
The purpose of the post is trying to understand 1. can a viable mesh-network exist 2. does the mesh network not currently exist because it's artificially suppressed by centralized networking (i.e. cellphone service providers' influence over the FCC), or 3. Does a mesh network not exist because physics
On point 3, we have made huge strides in miniaturization of electrical components since the dawn of radio; we have also made huge strides in battery technology.
That would suggest it's physically possible to build better devices, so maybe the limiting factor is more #2 nowadays, the ability to innovate is capped not by physics but by regulation.
Sure, things like LoRa exist, but are not widely useful.
If iPhones were a little more brick-like, maybe we wouldn't need to dump money into ISPs pockets; we could just have a standard communication language to bounce packets around. Then we don't need to pay cell phone bills, just buy new batteries.
I'm a big fan of the idea of a mesh network. That said you're probably not going to replace fiber optic networks (e.g.) with a mesh of wireless devices. But having a dynamic peer-to-peer wireless mesh to augment physical media is probably something that improves the overall network.
I tend to agree that likely regulation is part of this but maybe a counter example is people opening their WiFi networks, which isn't regulated against, but people generally don't do. OTOH we could have regulation forcing all WiFi networks to be open? With some mechanism of paying people for bandwidth usage? But who would drive something like that? I think that's not different than me going through your phone on the way to the next hop? You will need to give me some battery life, and some of your bandwidth, so what do you get in return?
The limitation is probably Metcalf's Law. It's difficult to mesh enough users to get the value of the network to match that of the cellular network, so the cellular network wins.
Your hypothetical high powered handheld transmitter (e.g. you cellphone?) is limited by the amount of power from your batteries and other factors.
EDIT: The bandwidth of radio waves is also limited and there's noise which limits the total amount of data you can broadcast.