I remember that was a thing in the 2014 protests and IIRC they were mostly using it not because anything was blocked by the government but because the cell networks were simply overloaded due to the density of devices.
Discussion
Yep! And there are many other examples. Palestine and Haiti come to mind.
The Nintendo DS Lite had this *built in* in 2008! It used WiFi instead of Bluetooth - which people will use as an excuse to dunk, not realizing WiFi has extended range AND bandwidth over BLE.
Meanwhile, the HAM crowd is waving their arms around pointing to LoRa, LoRaWAN, meshify, reticulum.. that you can buy a lilygo t-deck for < $100 that does all of the above…the freedom tech for this has been here in many UX-friendly form factors for almost 2 decades.