Not likely to be a problem with patents

Typically local and regional government are prohibited from overriding certain broad classes of national or trans-national law. In the case of national law this is enforced by the national government's own courts and police. So if rural Alaska decides to ignore the patent rights granted to "intellectual property owners" by the US congress, the Federal government is able to enforce those rights anyway, in extremis by sending armed Federal agents to confiscate the base station hardware.

As far as I know though there is no /international/ law of patents, so in places which either don't recognise patents nationally, or are outside any legitimate national territory (which might include Antarctica) it could be legal to ignore the patents.

Of course any nation or other sovereign entity can simply reject patents, or savagely reduce their force, but if years of arguing by economists, law makers and Free Software evangelists haven't convinced a country to do that, I hardly think that a free GSM cell for a small village or research station will make the difference.

While your assessment seems overoptimistic, its general direction doesn't.

More spesifically, I see this system as having most (not all, but most) of its potential use in developing countries. Of course the developed world has lobbied for ever stronger patent and copyright restrictions around there too (often tying slightly more freedom of trade for physical goods to significantly less freedom in general (trade included) for information in a cringeworthy double standard).

But I wonder if GSM patent holders have bothered to apply for relevant patents in every technological backwater, considering that they are indeed generally country-specific. I don't know, but I doubt it. Anyone have any solid data on this?