You have to have someone that will say good things about you. Not everyone necessary has that if their a dick. Most of the time they are looking for a job based reference as that's more relevant to them, especially if the reference has a public phone number or company email etc.
You should only need two references most of the time, so it should be doable with just references from your previous company? Or maybe the one before that in a short stint.
I thought that's what the Pico cells are for - each plane has a mini phone tower in it so phones happily connect to that instead of looking for ground stations