I'd love to see something like old school BBS systems take off again, an off the grid/off the internet network for hobbyists.
According to https://meshtastic.discourse.group/t/data-bandwidth-and-late... "But for the default very long range config it takes about 3 seconds to send 60ish bytes." Hmm, a bit slower than a 300 baud modem.
I worked on LoRaWAN systems a couple years ago, and from what I found the biggest determinant of performance was what frequency band you're in. US915 has a 400ms dwell time limit for single transmissions, while EU868 has a 1% duty cycle limit. LoRa was designed for sending small amounts of data infrequently -- that's the "low-power" in LPWAN. Where I worked we were pushing it to the limits to get a couple hundred bytes per second at close range. LoRa does have some nice properties and I'm glad to see people using it outside of LoRaWAN, which is somewhat bulky for point-to-point communication.
The routing model also makes it hard to add more than a few dozen nodes to a mesh. For small groups over wide distances that's absolutely fine, but it isn't a great option if you want to connect large numbers of _people_, unless said people are clustered around a few devices sharing WiFi or BLE connection time. (Meshtastic also doesn't really support this use case b/c of a "one device == one user/identity/mailbox" model, but that's an application-level choice, not something imposed by the underlying network.)
Also, you can buy 1 watt Lora modules made by Ebyte, Sparkfun sell them.
It would also be necessary to assure that any harmonics of 433 MHZ were within regulated limits.
EDIT: ETCI has specified 433 - 434 MHz as a LoRa band. In the US, the ARRL band plan[1] specifies those frequencies as auxiliary/repeater links, so they should be usable for LoRa, assuming no local frequency coordination disputes arise. The radio in question should be configured by the ham for that frequency.
EDIT2: In the US, and in general worldwide, hams can only communicate with other hams. So, 433 MHz LoRa would be limited to a mesh exclusively between hams, and with the necessary identification added. Unless you have specific reasons for using higher power, are a ham, and know what you're doing, it would be wise to use standard commercial LoRa radios, and stick to the 902 - 928 MHz radios in the US. (Which is shared with the 33 cm ham band - but the LoRa radios are low power.)
[0] http://www.arrl.org/news/fcc-proposes-18-000-fine-in-louisia...
This is less punitive than it seems, especially with the preamble "chirp" you can keep a link "alive" with a handful of seconds every ten minutes or so, without transmitting a message.
If the Rx woke up once a minute for a few seconds on a synched clock, then you are never more than a minute away from a message. This also aids in power management for battery life.
I am not sure how it would be policed, and what time period is acceptable for measuring, eg per hour, or is it ok one weekend a year at 20% continuous duty cycle, and technically is it per device or per user, and so on. (I think I know the reasonable answers to these questions, just saying).
But intent obviously is with higher power and range to ensure a minimum number of devices can operate in a given region.
But you can broadcast, so one transmission can hit many other users, and they could re-broadcast on your behalf as a store and forward type protocol, all for one transmission by you.