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Comment by Multicomp | Hacker News Reader

My hope is for someone to complete a smartphone-based ad hoc mesh network that can use bluetooth, wifi to pass messages along, up to 6 hops or similar.

Currently, the closest thing I'm aware of for that is cwtch which is a ricochet.im rewrite

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There was one out there for Android that worked great.

I wanted to build my own for emergency services and we figured out how to do some of the mesh routing but it didn't go far... WiFi Direct unfortunately only allows you to pair to one phone at a time (while bluetooth allows endless pairing outside of BLE)

this already exists in some forms [1] on top of the fact that amateur radio in general is quite capable of moving data whether by packet radio [2] (including packet radio BBS [3], things like hinternet [4], bbs over amateur radio, or plain old teletype (RTTY) as a means to operate access a console on a remote machine. there's a ton of interesting creative work being done in the space even though it isn't particularly mainstream-popular.

[1] http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/ [2] http://www.choisser.com/packet/ [3] https://www.scc-ares-races.org/data/packet/index.html [4] https://www.kqed.org/quest/8440/ham-radio-helping-to-build-a...

FireChat and Bridgify have both been used during the Hong Kong protests.

It looks like Brigify[1] does support multiple relay hops on a bluetooth mesh network to send a message.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgefy

I have no idea what it’s called but when I was in Cuba 5 or 6 years ago they used something like this on their mobile phones. They basically had an “internet” via bluetooth but without needing to connect to the “real” internet which was very expensive and monitored by the government.

SNET, it seems. Awesome! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Cuba#SNET

Cuba is amazing at making the most of what they have. I hadn’t heard of SNET before this, but I know they’ve kept classic cars running for decades out of necessity

I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that Cuba must have the highest concentration of “hackers” of any place in the world. We were on a bus going to the far west end of Cuba (where not many people travel to) and it broke down in the middle of no where and the bus driver managed to fix it with some scotch tape and a twisted up plastic shopping bag.

I’ve been to 70 countries and the Cuban people are hands down the most entrepreneurial of them all.

I heard of a few, but havent tried them:

disaster.radio

serval mesh

meshtastic

a different and cool project worth mentioning, more for distibuting teaching materials as I understand:

othernet.is

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