People forget that this network isnt for everyday use. It is for use in ad-hoc scenarios where cell or even satellite coverage falls apart. The most powerful aspect is that these things are deployable. A communication chain can be established as fast as people can move. Natural disasters are the most obvious use case, but more interesting are things like search and rescue.
Go somewhere properly remote such as the high north. There is no cell network outside of town. And the satellite coverage is spotty at best. Say you need to go look for someone. Meshtastic relays can be up and working in minutes. A chain of rescuers can spread out along a path, and remain talking to each other, as fast as they can move. Sure, radios can do this too, but long range voice radio require serious power and are still largely line-of-sight. Radio relays are an entirely other expensive thing.
Think also of remote camps (logging/planting/fishing/climbing etc). Toss a lora relay on every vehicle and every work party can talk via the app installed on their normal phones. Use GPS-enabled devices and you can passively keep track of every vehicle. Need to operate two valleys over? As the first crew deploys out they can plop down relays at key points. Years ago I setup something like this using wifi relays. It was hell. It never worked right. The range and lower power demands of lora would have been infinitely easier.
The range of these lora nodes is a bit of a myth. It is better than higher frequencies but you shouldn't expect anything more than a km with obstructions, realistically half that.
Not to say they don't fill a niche, but bandwidth and range limit it's viability to small operations; even an optimal network cant handle more than a few hundred tweets per hour.
With no Line of Sight and crowded urban environment, it worked only slightly better than Wifi for my previous employer. Not even 100 meters.
> The range of these lora nodes is a bit of a myth. It is better than higher frequencies but you shouldn't expect anything more than a km with obstructions, realistically half that.
I've done a number of projects with commercial radios operating in the 902-928MHz unlicensed band and typically we target 1-10 mi (roughly 1-20km). Elevated antennas with enough gain to get you to the legal limit (4W EIRP) can get you a heck of a lot of range, even without line of sight.
With line of sight, communication to the horizon is possible.
If you're talking about the EU 869 MHz unlicensed band used by LoraWAN, thats quite a bit different and I'm less familiar.
But how are enough people going to get the hardware in that ad-hoc scenario ?
Something that can also use devices we already have seems like a better solution. I'm surprised BitChat has not seen more popularity. Something that combined that + a dedicated hardware mesh transmitter (for longer range when needed) and allowed adhocactual network use between devices would be pretty damn cool.
Also arent LoRA systems mostly still line of sight?
I keep BitChat running on my phone.
Never had a peep from it. 0 connected peers, always -- in every environment.
This leads me to believe that it either does not work, or that I am the only one using it (in which case it also does not work).
> But how are enough people going to get the hardware in that ad-hoc scenario?
They already have it because they ready HN! Only somewhat fascitious... A few motivated individuals can provide connectivity to thousands. There's probably a few such folks in your city already!
> Something that combined that + a dedicated hardware mesh transmitter (for longer range when needed) and allowed adhocactual network use between devices would be pretty damn cool.
This is exactly how these systems tend to work in practice. Just connect your phone via Bluetooth then use the Meshtastic app. The app can function on it's own to send messages to other phones without cell service, you just won't get the range.
This does not sound terribly different from the original use case for the internet. Are there similar routing algorithms in place ?
Mesh routing beyond the small scale is an unsolved problem.
Similar, no. The basis of the internet is that each node announces who they are connecting to. Each node is expected to know which messages (packets) they can handle and which they cannot. This works because connections on the internet are stable. Nodes in an unstable ad-hoc mesh network don't know how they are connected, who they can pass messages for. So every node takes every message and repeats it to whatever other nodes are in range. It is a fundamentally different problem.
The range of these things is approximately the range of a loud yell.