Start your own Internet Resiliency Club

I agree with this assessment. I've been running two nodes for about a year, maybe longer, and in that time, I've only had perhaps two contacts.

Even with a YAGI or a dedicated pole antenna, both tuned to 868 MHz, the range in my location is quite poor. The signal seems to drop off quickly, even after walking just a kilometer down the road. While I understand that height is key (and my antennas are fairly high), it appears that 868 MHz attenuates very rapidly.

So, to reiterate, I don't believe Meshtastic is a particularly effective solution. The principle behind it is sound, but the practical execution falls short. I think established methods like Hamnet and traditional amateur radio are far superior, especially now with SDRs making a simple handheld radio incredibly affordable (around €20)

Wifi routers use quite a lot of power for the area that they can cover. Ten watts or so for a hundred square meters is a lot of you want to cover a whole city.

Yeah, having gone through the blackout in Spain this would be really useful (using phones).

Then only one person needs a generator and/or Starlink to provide some connectivity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FabFi

https://web.archive.org/web/20111119205258/http://fabfi.fabf...

I had worked with this almost 15 years ago. It was a neat project.

I'm surprised that phone manufacturers haven't already implemented a mesh network. I guess you could kind of call Apple's Find My network one, but if you want to smuggle arbitary data the bandwidth is very low. Maybe Apple's new mobile Wi-Fi chip is a precursor to an actual Internet mesh network.

It's exactly like Mountain View Google WiFi.

Meshtatisc's routing is extremely primitive and inefficient.

https://www.disk91.com/2024/technology/lora/critical-analysi...

This idea sounds a lot like Secure Scuttlebutt[0]. I'm not sure the state of it. The client they link to on their website ceased development awhile ago.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt

I see the sarcasm but you're likely not simulating this hard enough. This is what happened in most of Spain and Portugal during the recent power outage and it wasn't pretty.

To perhaps add a dimension to the issue, imagine that one day you woke up and the roads were not functional. Many people would have a great time, as long as they knew the roads were going to be functional later that day. If it turned into a longer problem, the disruption would have vast and unpleasant consequences.

We do not yet have an awareness of our dependence on technologies, nor of how fragile those technologies can be. If someone had suggested years ago that perhaps we should prepare for a disruption in say, the egg supply, that would have provoked laughter. And jokes like, well I really don't like eggs. Or what about toilet paper hoarding? Given just those two events alone, one might decide that disruptions are at least somewhat of a possibility. That our past assumptions of an unending supply of goods and services might not hold in the future.

It is a funny comment, and there are several dependencies I personally would not miss. Until I did.

Personally, the interesting concept is resiliency in general.

During peace, yes. If there is any sort of crisis, no

When Whatsapp and a bunch of social media went down a few years back I took a stroll outside that evening here in Berlin and the streets were weirdly buzzing. It was a bit surreal.

Maybe some sort of bias but I also view things this way.

I think the point of the article is not to use that mesh network as a replacement for internet. I think the author's idea is that the mesh network would provide the "resilience club" a communication channel while they work on recovering the regular internet.

I've just realised I've talked my way into the idea of creating per-city club-operated backbone networks based on something like 100 Mbit point-to-point Ethernet-over-microwave links. With tall buildings as hubs, you might actually be able to build a decent mesh, with WiFi, LoRa or both acting as access networks. You'd definitely want to throttle per-client bandwidth to prevent people from abusing your very limited long-range mesh bandwidth. None of this would be cheap; decent microwave links cost thousands, and you'd need backup solar and battery power for every part of the network.

I'd also consider thinking about using the "big ears, small mouth" technique to push up bandwidth; if a fixed link using a technology such as LoRa could transmit at a legal EIRP level, but coupled this with a really high gain parabolic dish (I'm thinking re-purposed satellite dishes) and low-noise amplifier at each end on the receive side, you could get substantially higher end-to-end Eb/No, and thus much higher bandwidth and range than would otherwise be legally possible. At first glance, the necessary hardware to do this looks quite doable, either by active RF switching between antennae, or the use of a hybrid/circulator to do the necessary duplexing. I'd be interested to see if anyone has already built, or even manufactures, something like this, and what the practical and regulatory barriers are to implementation.

Post-disaster onboarding is complicated by app store lockdowns and the difficulty of sideloading. Heck, even establishing plain http or self-signed https connections is tricky on phones now.

I'm sure someone smarter than me has a toolkit for these things, I just don't know where to find it.

Store-and-forward-wise, NNCP is designed for this, but it's not widespread yet.

I think the point of the article is not to use that mesh network as a replacement for internet. I think the author's idea is that the mesh network would provide the "resilience club" a communication channel while they work on recovering the regular internet.

It sounds like the author is envisaging a system that works without power (as long as the batteries last).

that is one of my pet peeves: people who try to dominate discussions or make them about themselves (you might notice they say "I" a lot)

another way you might see it manifest: a simple question is asked, and without pausing to hear the answer, the questioner then goes on a long speech about their personal experiences and why they're asking the question and what the meaning of the question is etc etc, rephrasing the question several different times along the way

if you're actually interested in learning the answer to your question: *think* about the question first; compress it into 1 short sentence (5-10 seconds long) ending in a question mark; say it; and as soon as you hit the question mark, immediately be silent so the answerer can actually answer the question and get to other questioners

if you're worried they might not understand the question that way: do it anyways, and if they don't, wait for a chance to ask again (after others have had theirs)

If I go to https://meshcore.co.uk/about.html, the fact that there is two youtube videos there and not a button that says "Download Docs PDF" shows me exactly how serious they are about "[We] connect people and things, without using the internet"

What I don't get about Meshcore is... What's their goal. They seem a commercial venture, their contact email is customers@..... I don't know they're license... I rather use meshtastic.

Huh. Hadn’t heard of Meshcore before. Thanks for that. It sounds more organized than Meshtastic. Seems more polished, but also a bit more opaque (from my cursory examination). That may just be, because it’s not had as much time to get established. It has all the open credentials.

From her article:

> Their answer was both depressing and freeing: “You can’t. All you can do is be prepared with tools and a plan for when the crisis arrives. That’s when the organization will listen.”

That is so sad, but also, so true.

I was fortunate to have worked for a company that is over 100 years old, and that had weathered a couple of wars, depression, recession, market disruption, etc.

They were about as open to disaster planning as anyone, but they could also be head-in-the-sand knuckleheads. The biggest thing was the company had a fiscal and cultural conservative bent; quite unusual in the tech industry, these days.

Anyone that has managed a DR system, knows how difficult it is to get support. Disaster Recovery is expensive, resource-intensive, and difficult to test. It is also stuff people don’t want to think about. Sort of like insurance.

The problem with lora (and APRS over satellite... well, even ground APRS) is, that the bandwidth is very limited and usually only for "one person at a time", so while meshtastic/meshcore might be fine for tens of stations and a few users chatting, once those numbers get higher, the routing/signalization uses up most of the bandwidth, and many people sending messages at the same time makes the whole system very unreliable.

APRS is a bit better, because it requires ham licences and (usually) a bit more expensive equipment, but with "SmartBeaconing" and just a few hams, you get collisions (multiple people transmitting at the same time, effectively jamming eachother).

Reddit is usually full of preppers and other idiots buying these cheap chinese radios, usually without any knowledge and licences (that are needed to use them), and in turn they know nothing about actual use of those devices.... simplex range in urban environment is measured in hundreds of meters or maybe one or two large buildings between radioss, and repeaters will be in use by actual emergency servics and not really usable for any kind of "private use".

tldr: get a few books, a pack of cards, wait it out, not so long ago being unreachable away from home was the norm, and we managed.

If it is that easy to become an artillery target, you can use it to your advantage. Randomly place LoRa devices in area near the front (by autonomous or fiber optic drone drop to decrease risk). Switch and off by some random timer and see the enemy deplete its shells and drones.

Regarding the T1000-E:

> Note: Currently, LR1110 radios are unable to receive Meshtastic packets from the older SX127x radios, it requires a breaking change to fix this. Transmitting works and when hopping through an SX126x radio, you can still receive packets from SX127x radios.

https://meshtastic.org/docs/hardware/devices/seeed-studio/se...

Its range is also much worse than the T-Echo's.

Starlink mini has a monthly cost, right? So it wouldn't be just ~250€ but more like 250€ + 50€/mo.