If I live in one state and my parents live a few states over, would I be able to use this network to communicate with them? Not sure if this is a mesh network for long range routing.
Meshcore in Australia is taking off and recently made the first Victoria - Tasmania link. Long distance comms are viable within state with many hops - if you are within range of a repeater hooked into the existing network is possible to go hundreds of kilometres quite easily. We have people participating in synchronous conversations that are occurring over a dozen hops from regional to inner urban anew back again. Yes messages do sometimes get lost but people are creating tools to troubleshoot and track. It’s genuinely doing what I had originally hoped Meshtastic would, but could never get messages far enough due to hop limits and telemetry cruft.
It’s theoretically possible under ideal conditions but probably not practical.
There is a maximum hop count of 7 which means there can be, at absolute maximum, seven nodes between the sender and recipient. The default, though, is 3 hops.
While the radios may, in theory, be able to work at the range of “a few states over” as the crow flies, terrain, structures, and line of sight would likely prohibit them from working in practice at such distances. You’d also need a reliable series of hops to reach from you to them. Again, at those distances, you’d very likely exceed the maximum hop count pretty quickly.
From what I’ve seen, large meshes are generally regional.
There’s a way to join meshes over the internet via MQTT but I haven’t messed with setting that up and in some cases it can potentially overwhelm a local mesh.
Thanks. What I thought after reading the docs a bit. I’ll look at some more options. I’m looking for a solution that doesn’t rely on internet or other infrastructure likely to be targeted in an attack. Likely what I’m looking for does not exist or is not built out near me.
You could try something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZxR-qtGH7c
That was fascinating. Thanks! Ive been thinking of getting my ham license. Might push me to get one.
HAM radio is about it for long comms that aren’t dependent on other systems.
Even then it takes technical skill on both ends to make that work.
Theres also Meshcore. Same devices, smaller user group, but hasany more hops. In theory messages can go further but its.so less adhoc.
Because of a recent update, favorited router nodes can act as a single hop, which would theoretically increase the amount of nodes that could be traversed before that 7-hop count was reached, but this still probably wouldn’t work out for OP.
Hello, sorry for the random question, but I’m new and still trying to understand the benefits of joining the network and how it works
What is the point of a network that:
- Is off-the-grid but can’t connect nodes that are too far away
- Is independent, but forces people to use LoRa which creates a dependence on LoRa-licensed radios
- Is decentralized, but obviously needs few centralized higher power backbone nodes in order to function (e.g. in this case)
- Is peer-to-peer, but from what I read it’s recommended to not have your node accessible at all times (or have it read-only?) in order to not have the TTL expire
- Cannot connect remote networks together, but also can’t bridge them in some other way
Is the main use case just connecting e.g. a couple of sensors on a remote farm a few kilometers away from your house, and have 2 neighbours relaying the messages to you along the way? 🤔 Why does that need a decentralized peer-to-peer network if it can just be done by simple repeaters?
I have these questions as well. I am subscribed anyway because I find the subject interesting. My assumption is that the protocol will not remain static and that with higher rates of adoption, the network will grow in strength and therefore usability and will evolve to accommodate that. Ultimately, a simple network that say, even just 10% the country participated in may be enough to allow universal off-grid communication which could be extremely useful. But there are a lot of roadblocks (not the least of which are the technical aspects you mention). There will also be a lot of exterior pressure along the way to adapt, extend and extinguish from capital interests.
@gkaklas @TechnoCat What is “too far away”? I’m seeing nodes up to 120k away in meshtastic and 220+km in meshcore, specifically the meshcore network in my area is spanning three nations and their capitals.
Milwaukee, WI to Lansing, MI. Has to go around a great big lake and back up.
What is “too far away”?
Hmm, you’re right, I guess I don’t mean the distance of the link by itself, but rather the fact that the number of hops and the dependence on central (?) high-power long-range nodes limits how far a message can go
While technically a mesh network, I’m not sure that with 3-7 hops it provides the benefits of one; in theory, just by being mesh it should be able to have a much larger (unlimited?) reach, just like the Internet.
Instead, from what I understand, user nodes are recommended to not participate in the routing, = they are just clients, but by being “mesh” they would be expected to actively participate in the network.
In this sense of “peer-to-peer”, we could say that my ISP is also a peer, and if it lost the connection to all other ISPs it could still continue working within the reach of its infrastructure, = my ISP is off-grid as well, and my connection to the ISP is independent since they own the fiber
Instead, I think the focus should be on building a distributed mesh network that is resilient and can’t be taken down by the failure of a couple of nodes. Similarly, with the dependence on LoRa radios: if e.g. the import or usage specifically of LoRa™®© chips is banned, the nodes who chose to use alternative technologies would not be affected and the network could continue to operate normally
@gkaklas My take is that for the given constraints (low-power, cheap, low-bandwidth) it works pretty well. If you want a more flexible (but way less beginner-friendly) mesh, have a look at reticulum, that can use all kinds of transport technologies.
for the given constraints (low-power, cheap, low-bandwidth) it works pretty well.
Of course! I’m just curious about 1) what are the real world use cases (e.g. my farm example) and 2) how come Meshtastic™®© is so popular with people who experiment with RF but don’t have these constraints; how come that having a couple of points of failure (either in the nodes or the technology) and not being able to experiment outside of LoRa™®© is not more of an issue
(For example I found:)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASH7
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NB-Fi
Reticulum
I was looking into it, seems more like what I have in mind, thank you!
Ive seen some people theoretically do it with meshcore with a lot of repeaters, but the amount of hops was crazy. Its just not practical unless you get into ham or something.
As the previous responder said, the mesh itself is unlikely to reach that far. MQTT can bridge larger gaps like that, but it depends on the internet. At that point, it probably makes more sense to just use conventional internet methods to communicate.
