Considering the amount of tech and self hosting types that live in cities, it seems like it would be popular to have little mesh intranets all over the place, but I’m not aware of any.
I read about NYC Mesh a while back, and I wonder if there are other similar things already in widespread use that I just haven’t heard about.
Meshcore is pretty impressive, meshtastic is neat too. Not much in terms of bandwidth but the reach is incredible.
After having tinkered with both, I think I prefer MeshNode because it tries to reduce chatter and IMO provide a better structure, however Meshtastic is easier to get into as all nodes will act as a repeater too, reducing the amount of setup required to have a functional network. If you’re in a medium sized city, there is likely some MeshCore repeaters out there, so you can try it only with only a companion device.
MeshCore seems to have the ability to reach much further away by reducing chatter (64 hops vs 3 hops in Meshtastic)
What is meshnode?
I know the network as a whole goes a long way, but how far can a single message actually be sent? Don’t both have a maximum number of hops and a hop is only a few km?
It certainly seems interesting, but I am not sure if it could be useful for me. Especially when no one I know is going to buy hardware for it. Is there a reason these don’t extend off the internet? Always thought some kind of internet/LoRa hybrid could lower the barrier to entry as most have internet connected devices already, and exposing them to the network some will realise they could pay less by switching to LoRa instead.
Meshtastic gives you three hops by default (and strongly advises against going beyond that, even if the maximum is seven). The furthest node I see right now is about 200 km away.
MeshCore gives you 64 hops. They can afford that because MeshCore devices send way less telemetry by default; Meshtastic assumes that you want to broadcast e.g. your GPS position regularly. The furthest node I see right now is about 50 km away.
By the way, while LoRaWAN is a thing, neither Meshtastic not MeshCore are really designed for data traffic. Owing to the low (and shared) bandwidth, they’re more like IRC over radio.
Oh yeah I wasn’t really thinking of downloading porn over it, but internet at least gives a global network to connect into. Text communication is still a form of data and if it can be used normally day to day then you have more infrastructure that people are used to using and is still usable in a disaster as well, even if you lose access to all WAN nodes you should have local communication.