A series of events lead me to realise the internet as we know it is extremely easy to kill. In India especially the government isn’t afraid to shutdown the internet. A group here created https://internetshutdowns.in/ to track shutdowns in India.
This along with some other recent happenings led me to wanting to have a “uncensorable” for of communication. This led me to learning about 3 projects.
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Meshtastic
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OpenManet
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Reticulum/Nomad Network
Each of these projects has some pros and cons. I want to document these. As well as document my experiments with each of these and hopefully help some folks make some informed decisions about picking these networks.
Meshtastic
Meshtastic is often the first name you hear when you talk about LoRA mesh networks. It can be connected through a bunch of different hardware. I personally am picking up a lillygo T-beam supreme.
Pros
When meshtastic works well it works really well. A good example of a community coming together is the twin cities(Saint Paul and Minneapolis). You can view their heat map for an idea of their coverage
Mesthastic Coverage Map - MSPMesh - Twin Cities, Greater MN, Western WI Mesh Networking Group . In terms of hardware you can get involved with a relatively low cost hardware investment. If you need an a multi purpose device heltech sells the meshpocket a battery pack that doubles as a battery pack.
Cons
Like almost every project there are compromises. By default all packets on meshtastic are not encrypted. You can quite literally snoop on all traffic flowing through a section of the network if you setup a gateway or a repeater.
This is a limitation of all Lora but for long distances you need line of sight I.e a unblocked view of your the node your trying to contact unless you have repeater to repeat your data along to your destination.
OpenManet
OpenManet is actually a pretty interesting project it uses relatively “new” technology in the form of 802.11ah (WiFi LoRA aka WiFi Halow aka holy shit my neighbor has a kilometer wide WiFi network). It uses Batman-adv(B.A.T.M.A.N Advanced) a layer 2 network routing protocol to effectively create a mesh network between a centeral gateway node and multiple roaming nodes to give you massive coverage for regular internet.
This poses a interesting solution to network blackouts in disaster situation with the gateway connecting via satellite internet. However this has the major limitation WiFi LoRA really depends on not having large obstructions, and has a much shortee range compared to regular LoRA in practice its about ~1km.
Pros
It’s regular internet pretty much all existing applications will work. You can use it for IoT applications and this in fact where WiFi LoRA is used most often.
Cons
Firstly it’s expensive. You need way more hardware some of which is really hard to get right now. The rampocalypse was not kind to the costs of getting started.
Due to its short range, it can be problematic to cover a large region and latency can be quite high. Also its strength is much lower then Lora.
Reticulum
This is honestly the most interesting out of all. The reticulum network/nomad network is built to be agnostic of the underlying protocol. In theory on one end you could have someone using morse code and on the other end a 10 gig fiber uplink.
Pros
Reticulum is built with privacy first. Everything is built on cryptography. All packets are encrypted and there’s no way for nodes in between in the route to determine the identity of the recipient and the sender.
Due to reticulum’s network agnostic nature it is effectively impossible to block. In the worst case one could print out qr codes on paper and then send them via carrier pigeon thus making RFC 1149 real. Jokes aside this is incredibly powerful for a network as we are not dependent on ISPs to transmit data. This also means one can connect to reticulum via the regular internet there’s no need to have extra hardware for it however one can make an rnode for LoRA.
Cons
Due to a series of unfortunate incidents and harassment. Nomad net and reticulum are now developed behind closed doors and a public mirror exists that’s updated when a release happens. It is technically open source however in spirit it is not.
Reticulum isn’t as well known as meshtastic hence fewer people are on the network. And due to its nature social discovery is harder.
I will be posting more as I receive hardware to experiment with. Overall I’m most interested in reticulum. However I’m also excited to play around with meshtastic and possibly get more folks in my city to get into it