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Comment by laurowyn | Hacker News Reader

> What is the use case?

It's primarily just an experimental system. Demonstrating that fixed infrastructure isn't actually necessary to communicate.

Beyond that, it's a mixture of HAM radio for communicating with people outside of your immediate circle, and disaster prep.

The best realistic scenario I can see for using it is after a sever weather event like hurricane, tornado, tsunami, etc. that takes out significant comms equipment. Having an ad-hoc network pop up using battery powered nodes able to setup a secure comms channel to organise aid deliveries would be a powerful tool. But existing infrastructure is resilient enough that it's not actually necessary in modern times.

Beyond that, it's probably more of an IoT type thing. Setup a bunch of nodes across a significant area of land, run machinery, sensors, etc. remotely via a self-healing mesh network.

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People forget that this network isnt for everyday use. It is for use in ad-hoc scenarios where cell or even satellite coverage falls apart. The most powerful aspect is that these things are deployable. A communication chain can be established as fast as people can move. Natural disasters are the most obvious use case, but more interesting are things like search and rescue.

Go somewhere properly remote such as the high north. There is no cell network outside of town. And the satellite coverage is spotty at best. Say you need to go look for someone. Meshtastic relays can be up and working in minutes. A chain of rescuers can spread out along a path, and remain talking to each other, as fast as they can move. Sure, radios can do this too, but long range voice radio require serious power and are still largely line-of-sight. Radio relays are an entirely other expensive thing.

Think also of remote camps (logging/planting/fishing/climbing etc). Toss a lora relay on every vehicle and every work party can talk via the app installed on their normal phones. Use GPS-enabled devices and you can passively keep track of every vehicle. Need to operate two valleys over? As the first crew deploys out they can plop down relays at key points. Years ago I setup something like this using wifi relays. It was hell. It never worked right. The range and lower power demands of lora would have been infinitely easier.

The range of these lora nodes is a bit of a myth. It is better than higher frequencies but you shouldn't expect anything more than a km with obstructions, realistically half that.

Not to say they don't fill a niche, but bandwidth and range limit it's viability to small operations; even an optimal network cant handle more than a few hundred tweets per hour.

> The range of these lora nodes is a bit of a myth. It is better than higher frequencies but you shouldn't expect anything more than a km with obstructions, realistically half that.

I've done a number of projects with commercial radios operating in the 902-928MHz unlicensed band and typically we target 1-10 mi (roughly 1-20km). Elevated antennas with enough gain to get you to the legal limit (4W EIRP) can get you a heck of a lot of range, even without line of sight.

With line of sight, communication to the horizon is possible.

If you're talking about the EU 869 MHz unlicensed band used by LoraWAN, thats quite a bit different and I'm less familiar.

With no Line of Sight and crowded urban environment, it worked only slightly better than Wifi for my previous employer. Not even 100 meters.

But how are enough people going to get the hardware in that ad-hoc scenario ?

Something that can also use devices we already have seems like a better solution. I'm surprised BitChat has not seen more popularity. Something that combined that + a dedicated hardware mesh transmitter (for longer range when needed) and allowed adhocactual network use between devices would be pretty damn cool.

Also arent LoRA systems mostly still line of sight?

> But how are enough people going to get the hardware in that ad-hoc scenario?

They already have it because they ready HN! Only somewhat fascitious... A few motivated individuals can provide connectivity to thousands. There's probably a few such folks in your city already!

> Something that combined that + a dedicated hardware mesh transmitter (for longer range when needed) and allowed adhocactual network use between devices would be pretty damn cool.

This is exactly how these systems tend to work in practice. Just connect your phone via Bluetooth then use the Meshtastic app. The app can function on it's own to send messages to other phones without cell service, you just won't get the range.

I keep BitChat running on my phone.

Never had a peep from it. 0 connected peers, always -- in every environment.

This leads me to believe that it either does not work, or that I am the only one using it (in which case it also does not work).

This does not sound terribly different from the original use case for the internet. Are there similar routing algorithms in place ?

Similar, no. The basis of the internet is that each node announces who they are connecting to. Each node is expected to know which messages (packets) they can handle and which they cannot. This works because connections on the internet are stable. Nodes in an unstable ad-hoc mesh network don't know how they are connected, who they can pass messages for. So every node takes every message and repeats it to whatever other nodes are in range. It is a fundamentally different problem.

Mesh routing beyond the small scale is an unsolved problem.

The range of these things is approximately the range of a loud yell.

or miles easily on 900mhz if you’re on a hill…

"Setup a bunch of nodes across a significant area of land, run ... sensors"

This is my use case. There are no other options that don't demand something like cell phone coverage (LOL no) and cost $1K/node and maybe $50/month until you give up on the project. For hobbyists this is a total non-starter. Do you have a budget for satellite telemetry, LOL no.

With meshcore its more like $100/node and $0/month forever which is somewhat more affordable than the next cheapest possible competitor.

For a scientific-ish environmental sensor that generates a couple integer data points every hour or so, its vastly more than fast enough. My project is not far enough along to discuss beyond that and I may end up scrapping it for reasons totally unrelated to networking LOL. At least the networking side was beyond trivial to set up.

Very handwavy meshcore is meshtastic plus the lessons about digipeating etc that ham radio guys (like me) figured out the hard way back in the 80s/90s. So I have zero interest in reinventing the wheel with meshtastic and reliving the problems of the 80s in the 20s. I don't think meshtastic devs looked at prior art when they initially designed it, or they would have done things quite a bit more like meshcore.

There is approximately infinite interpersonal drama in both projects with all kinds of legal wrangling and much bike shedding apparently to prevent progress. I would not be surprised if TPTB are using funded LLM bots to disrupt those projects. Its pretty bad but as long as you stay away from the communities and socializing, both projects produce good code. I suppose for people that like that sort of thing, either project would be very attractive.

Some scary applications come to mind.

For instance, sprinkling a bunch of nodes + sensors in hostile territory should allow for gathering intelligence, guiding drones, setting of fuses...

Line of sight needed, trivial to jam, power hungry, trivial to fox hunt. These are not boogyman devices. The real boogyman devices are the ones in space. Big militaries don't need things on earth to do any of the things you listed and way more.

Keep in mind that this is a very low bandwidth, high latency mesh network. Great for sending short text messages, absolutely terrible for guiding drones.

That’s not necessarily the case. It depends on how autonomous your drone is and what you need to guide it to do…

ExpressLRS[0] (drone / radio control protocol) also uses LoRa, I wonder if anyone's tried mesh networking it…

[0] https://www.expresslrs.org/

Russia and Ukraine both use meshed drone control networks now, dunno which tech stack, but likely this or similar.

Yeah. Actuality I was thinking about less sophisticated adversaries. So called "failed states", nonstate groups, organized crime, amateur surveillance, corporate espionage, sabotage.

Mesh networks are already used by both Russia and Ukraine to guide drones.

With the obvious solution of putting mesh nodes on the drones, foregoing the scattering part.

For everyone else, IoT is already there. And good old paying people to do things (the supply of dumb people never gets depleted).

...but also resistance in the context of authoritarian capture.

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