Before wireless came to my rural area, we used to joke about how the phone companies ran dialup over barbed wire. "Internet's down; deer must have broken the barbed wire again."

Imagine having a mesh of hundreds of fibre optic cables strewn across the border.

Many having wireless routers at their terminus to forward traffic to other cables. Other cables having vertices and graph-like structures so that they could tolerate cuts in individual lines.

The end result could be something quite authentic to ARPANET.