Meshcore in Australia is taking off and recently made the first Victoria - Tasmania link. Long distance comms are viable within state with many hops - if you are within range of a repeater hooked into the existing network is possible to go hundreds of kilometres quite easily. We have people participating in synchronous conversations that are occurring over a dozen hops from regional to inner urban anew back again. Yes messages do sometimes get lost but people are creating tools to troubleshoot and track. It’s genuinely doing what I had originally hoped Meshtastic would, but could never get messages far enough due to hop limits and telemetry cruft.