Yes, but whoever is running a node, needs to have a decent connection to offer to others, and not be restricted by whoever their service provider is. In the grand scheme of things, mesh networks are the solution to centralised internet service provision. It has been used successfully in Athens when the police attempted to control people through their internet access when they were self organising protests.
I also recently, via coming into contact with the Verge coin, became aware of the Invisible Internet Project (I2P), an anonymous network layer that allows for censorship resistant, peer to peer communication.
The idea is that everyone will be using Substratum while hosting at the same time, and their data packets are on the layer of http / tcp indistinguishable as some knowable Substratum packet..
I think I need to look into this further. Thanks for the starter Kevin!