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What are some of the biggest public/private wireless mesh networks out there? (I suppose 'biggest' by measure of node count -- or maybe area covered?). For those networks, how deep are they in practice? 100 hops seems unrealstic, but a great way to find scaling problems.

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I work on mesh networks for the smart utilities (think smart metering in India).

Our deployments are in the hundreds of thousands and individual meshes of up to 1000 nodes. We use similar technologies to described in the article (802.15.4, RPL, IPv6, CoAP, 6LoWPAN, DTLS, etc).

Topology-wise, our meshes don't tend to exceed 10 hops (chains like described here aren't great, tho can function).

Intresting. What's the best real world solution to having those meters in basements or behind high density walls?

I also worked in the space, though from the utility side. Multi-dwelling units are a problem, though not from the networking side. In my experience the commercial stacks had no issue with that kind of density. Also, we found that 900mHz signals can reach a lot further than one would think, at least intermittently (e.g. across the SF bay).

Where can I learn more about why multi dwelling units are a problem?

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