Meshtastic, like any other network (including mesh wifi) is not immune to the requirement for some planning.
My area has a couple of very well-placed mountaintop ROUTERs that tend to suppress most of the low level urban flooding noise, and so local messaging out to 80km or so tends to be pretty reliable. The same would be absolutely impossible with wifi.
That’s with 80 or so local nodes on LONG_FAST, population of around half a million.
Thats said, Meshtastic’s routing algorithm is extremely inefficient and has huge room for improvement.
> My area has a couple of very well-placed mountaintop ROUTERs that tend to suppress most of the low level urban flooding noise
What does this mean exactly and how does it address GP's concerns?
Different nodes can be configured to have different roles, which impact in various ways the effectiveness of the network. Having used Meshtastic, the previous poster will have some familiarity with these.
https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/device/