How can people in Iran freely access internet?

Is there a way to cheaply provide a solution with SDR, Mesh, etc..

One possible way might be internet over HAM radio [1] especially if you are near the boarder and someone can relay/proxy for you, maybe. SDR Amateur Radio equipment is much more affordable now or at least less expensive than Starlink. This would be mostly for lightweight news sites and chat. Find a local HAM operator to assist you with this.

If the goal is to get videos to the media then put them on a cheap USB thumb drive in a password protected 7-zip. [2] Tell the reporter the location and password from an anonymous phone call. Assume reporters are government, so consider putting many USB drives in many places and give each reporter a different USB location. This assumes the media have satellite internet or trusted mules.

Or conversely if the goal is to share media from around the world, find someone with Starlink and download news videos using something like yt-dlp [3] and save them to thumb drives. Distribute the thumb drives to friends and have friends copy to other drives and repeat the process. One can "save-as" some news pages to directories on the thumb drives. Smaller thumb drives can be bought in bulk for very little. This is also known as SneakerNet [4].

[1] - https://www.arrl.org/internet-ham-radio

[2] - https://7-zip.org/

[3] - https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases

[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

Great solutions are suggested but in order to make it clear, let me be more specific. Iran has restricted the internet in a way that even with a VPN it is very hard to connect to the outside world. This is after killing #mahsaamini last week in custody. The problem mostly has to do with sending media and image files to the outside world. Is there a safe way for encrypted peer-to-peer communication with cells to send data through voice etc. Also taking note that iranian government has created an interanet(arvancloud.com) that helps it operate websites like banking transactions.

I don’t know if this will help, but I recently read (on HN) about a new capability for IP access via SMS:

https://github.com/spandanb/ipos

Dial up internet? Do the phone lines still work?

In case you are not aware, after killing an innocent Kurdish woman (named Jina/Mahsa Amini) for not wearing Hijab in the capital city of Tehran by the "Iranian morality police" (they literally beat her to death) there has been ongoing protests across the whole country and Iran has been shooting, beating and killing people on the streets, as a result the internet has been severely restricted, censored and completely cut-off from the global network at times.

I'm from one the Kurdish cities, the situation here is even worse, much much worse. (hearing the sound of shootings as I write this)

I'm very tech savvy and I was wondering what are the things we can do to access the uncensored global internet, share it with more people and spread information and awareness in moments and situations like this.

The 2 main challenges are:

1- Accessing the global internet: They always cut off the global internet and switch (and route everything) to the local "intranet". The internal intranet they have created on top of the current infrastructure works in moments like this (only to access government websites, banking system & the systems & sites they host and control).

    When they do this non of the usual methods to access the internet and bypassing censorship works, I'm talking about the following tools/methods:
        1- Tor (with all the bridges, proxies, obfuscation)
        2- VPN : Commercial ones don't work, personal ones don't work either, I have tried many methods, WireGuard, OpenVPN, IPSec/IKEv2, changing the ports, masking them as DNS, https, Compiling my own modified ones, using different VPSs even the ones in countries Iran considers friendly.
        3- ShadowSocks
        4- VPNGate by the University of Tsukuba: Tried every single server, didn't work.
        5- Using CloudFlare's WARP + 1.1.1.1 DNS: I'm still not sure about this one, I once managed to connect after modifying my router and DNS settings but it didn't last 10 minutes.
        6- SSH Tunnels: the same as VPNs.

Most of this infrastructure has been create by a few government backed and supported companies such as "Abr-e-Arvan" (arvancloud.com). They have servers (VPS) inside Iran but also in the Nederlands. I haven't tested their Holland server's yet, if you (Iranian) have please give us an update.

Most of their networking equipment is from Huawei I guess, not 100% sure though.

2- Commutation and messaging apps that can work with peer-to-peer technologies. I remember during Hong Kong protests they used an app that worked between the protestors even without having an internet connection. What are the viable and secure options here?

If you need more information and questions I'll be happy to answer and provide as much as possible. Thank you all in advance.

P.S: How I got access to post this? My portable devices still don't have access, the home ADSL has a weak and shaky one. Oh and I posted this on HackerNews from YC too, hoping to get some interesting answers (from people who work in big companies such as Huawei, Cisco, Siemens, Ericsson &...) but they never approved my post. And searching for Iran on HN returns 0 results when I tried. Tried to post it on SysAdmin on Reddit but they didn't approve my post.