If you go that route, make certain that they pick up a Freedom Kit. It’s basically a kit that allows Nomads to avoid interacting with Maya, except on their own terms. Down to being able to boil their own water so they don’t consume the nano-RFIDs that report on biological processes to the corporate overlords.
As a GM I’m a huge fan of using mechanics to emphasis the story, and you can certainly play up on the differences between Maya and Arachne using relatively simple mechanics.
I had a scene in my game where my players investigated an Atek community at a Maya-Blackzone (ie area with no Maya connection). There was still an Arachne connection there, but my players failed to find it (none of them were familiar with Arachne so there was a +1D on the test for them to notice the node). As a result they couldn’t do any research or call for backup while inside the Blackzone.
Other things you can do is to make the difficulty for different characters different depending on what they’re using. So plausibly it’s +1D for the Nomad to research something because there’s a spotty Arachne connection; flipside is that it’s +2D for the target to work out they’re being researched. Maybe the Nomad player puts up with the bad connection, or subjects themselves to Mayanet in the name of bandwidth.
You can do the reverse when you drop the crowd onto a Mothership: suddenly everyone who isn’t familiar with Arachne gets +1D on their research tests because they’re unfamiliar with the system. This makes the Nomad character’s time a bottleneck for research and makes them feel special.
And this is before your Nomad character starts setting up Arachne nodes because he doesn’t want to deal with bad ping. 
An idea I’m going to run with is making finding and using an Arachne node a Challenging test.
My thinking is that the test should be Hacking/Analysis D2 and take seconds. Freedom Kit is -1D on the test, and being unfamiliar with Arachne is +1D.
D2 is a nice middle group of something being easy enough to find to be or practical use but hidden enough that they aren’t trivial to find by the authorities. Then it’s simple: Complications result in a worse node*, Momentum spends results in better than average connections in a way decided by the player.
A standard Arachne Node is “+1 Difficulty to Research/Hacking tests through it, +1 Difficulty to anyone trying to detect the character using the Node.”
* I highly recommend making a node a “honey pot” node that has been compromised by local security. Much lols.
