Because they are toys. For real work it makes so much more sense to use the internet. With the new satellite tech you can reach the internet everywhere.

Mesh radio is a fun way to chat with radio nerds in your area. Not a serious infrastructure.

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KingMachiavelli an hour ago | parent | next [-]

So what’s the real solution for when Starlink is too expensive and too high power? I really want to solution for remote mountaineering communication that’s not just GMRS. And what about remote weather sensors? I really don’t need a full internet connection just to send a tiny payload every 5 minutes.

Meshtastic should be the obvious answer for this but in my limited experience the app(s) and code are buggy on even the most typical hardware. Wish it wasn’t the case but it is.

	▲	Gigachad an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Depends what exactly it is you want. But phones these days can communicate with satellites for emergency messaging. I think people need to think more about what the actual scenario they have in mind is because it seems most people think of mesh radio as some backup for the government shutting the internet down. When in reality it’s almost useless for that since it’s so easy to jam or flood mesh radio.

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__MatrixMan__ 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We may see a day when the internet is not available, or when interacting with it represents an unacceptable risk. It's a good idea to know how to set up your own.

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Gigachad 6 hours ago | parent [-]

In that day whatever is jamming starlink will just jam mesh radio too. It'll likely be even easier.

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andwur 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's a different jamming scenario however. Starlink is comparatively centralised, and reliant on both terrestrial (ground stations) and satellite communication. While the terminals themselves are sparse and widely distributed, the backbone infrastructure is far less so. It's possible to target the satellites, ground stations and critical service dependencies (e.g. GPS) rather than needing to target the hundred of thousands/millions of terminals directly.

The mesh networks are dealing with, by definition, a sparse and widely distributed set of devices which are independently configured and controlled, and in their current widely available form are only dealing with terrestrial communication. Without that point of centralisation you would need to focus on targetted regional jamming, as from a practical standpoint you cannot perform wideband RF jamming over an entire country - signal jammers don't scale that well, and geographic features come into play. As an example you might effectively block mesh networks from operating reliably in a given city, but if people were to move outside of that area then the mesh would operate again. Geography is both a strength and a weakness here: a mountain range will impede direct communication with someone on the other side, but it will also have the same effect on jammers which will vastly increase the cost to deploy them in a ubiquitous fashion.

	▲	Gigachad an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I suspect jamming LoRa could be a lot easier than most radio though. LoRa signals are incredibly weak and long range. A jammer which jams at a massively higher power level could cover a massive area. You can also just flood the network with messages that nodes will happily relay further for you.

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api 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s really the killer for survivalist mesh ideas. It’s trivially easy to jam, and if it’s open it’s also easy to DDOS.

Jamming is done in military scenarios too, but in that case it’s limited by the fact that a jammer is a big transmitter painting itself with a big sign that says “fire missile here.” Civilian mesh doesn’t have that fallback.

	▲	nostrademons 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Neglect is a bigger killer than active denial. If the Internet goes down it will likely be because a few execs decided to replace competent network admins with AI, or because all the competent network admins decided to quiet-quit because they aren't being paid jack compared to the folks hawking AI vaporware.
	▲	samplifier 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Battlestar Galactica opened my eyes to this problem more than electronic warfare in games of the day did. It's freaky (read: terrifying) that we're getting to a point that people are starting to take "embedded information (and decision)" systems serious enough to deploy them into meat space.

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nubinetwork 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> not a serious infrastructure

I've been tinkering with the tech to make city-wide flrc meshes joined together over the internet, my estimates are that it should be at least able to support thousands of users per region.

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Gigachad an hour ago | parent [-]

This has been tried with mqtt bridges in Meshtastic. But it’s ultimately kind of pointless because if you are planning some kind of internet alternative, you don’t want to build something that falls over the moment the internet goes down.

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nubinetwork an hour ago | parent [-]

I know, I'm not too worried that I can't reach Billy in Ottawa, but you should still be able to text your mother six blocks away. /shrug

	▲	Gigachad 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That works with just basic mesh radio. The internet bridges thing is tempting but ultimately a bit useless and doesn't push people to extend the mesh natively.

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5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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