The "100x bandwidth" claim needs to be substantiated.
There are some significant regulatory issues with the current popular mesh network protocols in the USA, namely that neither MeshCore or Meshtastic are compliant with the actual FCC regulations. 100x bandwidth because you're breaking the rules isn't the same as 100x bandwidth legally.
The issue you linked to is about MeshCore using channels that are too narrow. A mesh system claiming to offer 100x bandwidth is probably not violating regulations in that particular way.
It sucks how everything feels like a toy. I think meshtastic is the closest thing to a “product”. They made a bunch of bad architectural decisions that are haunting them now like how nodes broadcast its info.
It doesn't surprise me. This is a deep networking problem and very few CS people know anything about networking or how to design clean, fast, low-overhead network protocols and systems.
If IP were designed today the packets would have 500+ bytes of plain text JSON as headers and the spec would support hundreds of extensions.
Correct me if I am wrong but I thought the primary appeal of LoRa was range? Also isn't the primary factor in making long range radio go through things is the frequency? So 2.4ghz is the same frequency as consumer wifi right and thus would propagate about the same right?
It doesn't seem like this would be that useful except that the protocol is LoRa so you can have higher bandwidth between two devices if they happen to be close enough together.
LoRa would go much farther than Wifi on 2.4ghz. Lora uses Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) modulation while wifi uses OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing). The first being designed for extreme range while the latter for bandwidth. At 2.4ghz you could probably get LoRa connections up to 6 miles with the right antenna height.
6 miles seems a very optimistic estimation: 2.4Ghz propagation is very reduced by obstacles like buildings or trees and at that frequency the atmospheric water (fog, rain, humidity) have a big impact on propagation. And you need also to consider that 2.4Ghz is a very polluted band, then the noise floor is significatevly higher than in the 865/915 Mhz.
Moreover at 2.4Ghz the Fresnel window is smaller and the risk of multipath fading is higher.
FSP loss for 915 MHz at 10 kms is ~ -111.67 dB while for 2.4 GHz is -120 dB.
That is a 9 dB loss which is significant. It could mean the difference between a copy or just plain static though the LoRa is supposed to be copyable down to -140 dBm.
The max tx power is around 150 mW (21.76 dBm), so at 10 kms, the RSSI is 21.76-120 = -98.24 dBm which is above the -140 dBm limit.
This calculation is assuming there is no loss due to vegetation or humidity or other barriers.
"Going through things" isn't always necessary / is avoidable in some deployments. And 2.4GHz signals can propagate an okay distance between nodes if there aren't things to go through. (Globalstar's emergency SOS satellite constellation uses the n53 band, which is right above the 2.4GHz "wi-fi" band, and it propagates between handsets and LEO through 1400km of air just fine.)
So you could probably pull off a 2.4GHz mesh outdoors in rural areas? It'd be feasible in the same places a microwave-laser hilltop-to-hilltop link would, but instead of "fast but point-to-point" it's "slow but meshed" (and with much larger tolerance for slop — you don't need to put everything on fixed masts so they have perfect line-of-sight, you can just stick them on the tops of trees or whatever and if they wave in the wind it still works.)
Mind you, the authors' motivating use-case for the hardware seems to be their project (https://github.com/datapartyjs/MeshTNC) to (AFAICT) bridge LoRa (or some specific LoRa L2 protocol — Meshtastic, probably?) to packet radio, i.e. digital packet-switched signalling over amateur (HAM) radio bands.
In that context, the tradeoff of high throughput for low propagation makes sense. Insofar as you're working with LoRa, and want to build and experiment with a bunch of site-local devices that mesh between themselves and interoperate with LoRa data-link protocols, you'd likely be speaking something like LoRA over 2.4GHz (LoRa itself doesn't spec a way to do that, but you could make it happen within the closed ecosystem of your own home/office.)
And in that context, you could use a MeshTNC device as something like "LoRaLAN" router. It'd be something you'd keep somewhere central in your house (like a wi-fi router), plugged into power + an antenna (internal to your house, like a wi-fi router) and plugged into a packet-radio transceiver with its own even-bigger antenna, outside your house. (Like a wi-fi router being plugged into a gateway modem on its upstream WAN port.)
This MeshTNC device would then pick up signals from:
- regular LoRaWAN IoT devices and Meshtastic handsets in your building
- more custom devices in your building†, that you've built yourself, that use another MeshTNC module; where these other devices do their part of the meshing only on the 2.4GHz band, which means they don't need big fiddly external antennas like LoRa devices do, but can be quite compact
- and possibly, a separate bidirectional LoRa repeater (made from any existing "high-gain" LoRa module, i.e. the kind used in mains-powered LoRaWAN base stations) — which brings in LoRa mesh traffic from outside your building, and picks up and carries away "destined for elsewhere in this area" LoRa mesh traffic that your "LoRaLAN" device has emitted (either due to forwarding it from your 2.4GHz-only mesh handsets/devices, or due to forwarding it after receiving it from packet radio.)
Though keep in mind you only need that complexity for the 2.4GHz-only mesh devices, since there isn't an existing mesh to forward those packets. But this whole setup is still also a regular LoRa mesh, and so you can still use regular LoRa (e.g. meshtastic) handsets, and put out packets that make their way through your regional mesh, back to the packet-radio bridge in your building; and from there to who-knows-where.
† To be clear, the 2.4GHz mesh handsets would only work reliably inside your building (if the 2.4GHz antenna is inside your building); but knowing HAMs, half the point would be seeing how far away you could get from your house/office and have your 2.4GHz mesh handsets keep working. (You'd probably want to have a second MeshTNC "base station" with a building-external antenna to try that. Pleasantly, that doesn't complicate the topology; it's all still just mesh, so you can just drop that in.)
How are they increasing the bandwidth? It's a hardware limitation of the radios. Even if you run the lowest spread factor (SF) and highest bandwidth setting on the radio, it's still not great. And the radio buffer is 255 bytes. I'm also curious why they're starting a new project with the SX1276 instead of SX1262.
Seems like this would support institutional/campus environments or changing environments where the sensors at the edge are sending higher bandwidth ultimately back to an Internet node using LoRA mesh--instead of directional WiFi?
I'm trying to envision the application of a mesh like this. These could be examples?
- interconnected nodes need to share data (like images)
- interconnected nodes are acting as a collective array of sensors (eg. geolocation)
- interconnected mesh nodes provide redundant pathways back to the central node
- interconnected mesh nodes provide spatial diversity in case of interference or jamming
- nodes are mobile (eg. drone or vehicle) and mesh provides alternative connectivity based on node location and RF attenuation (also provides longer range with mesh connectivity)
Gonna reply here, but this isn't about you or this post:
HN has a lot of us that have ~0 idea what you'd use this for, even when we steelman, all we can do is vaguely handwave about easier to setup wireless internet on a vast compound we own.
Would be really cool if someone could hop in and just give a couple one off examples, i guess? Only other one handwave I can think of is IOT x assembly line stuff for businesses, but I'm real curious why individuals are so into it -- or maybe they're not, and that's why the codebase quality is so poor? Idk.
You'll read a lot of illusions and wishful intentions.
In the end: LoRa is only good for very short text messages at somewhat long distance (up to 10km without special setup) and without bad conditions (obstacles on line of sight, rain/fog). There is an ongoing fight between each of the two frequencies to be used as default and this publication adds another frequency into the battle.
There is WiFi HaLow, a relatively new WiFi protocol which seems to solve the low bandwidth issues with LoRa on relatively confortable distance (likely up to 8km, same as with LoRa in regards to Line of Sight), albeit slightly less affected by weather conditions. The advantage here is permitting to send images and binary data in general, but think about something being sent at the speed levels from 2005 (which in any case is good speed for most usable things).
Then there are other relevant mesh protocols yet to mention here like ESPnow which is my personal favorite. Whereas the other two options above are exotic and with transceivers around the 50 EUR and above. With ESPnow you just need any cheap ESP32 embedded device with an optional antenna to increase range for about 3 EUR (antenna included). With that you get similar returns to WiFi HaLow with less range (about 3 kilometers max on my experiments) but cheap like heck.
To setup internet on a vast compound, WiFi HaLow might be a good investment. If you are with a constrained budget, then ESP32 is your friend. To remember, long distance is limited so if you are considering more than 8 devices exchanging heavy data, you should just go for proper WiFi long range transmitters.
Assuming you mean mesh in general:
Meshtastic like projects
- emergency communication
- low power data transfer for sensors
- low data rate data transfer for mobile groups. Air softers use it to transmit information to each other while playing.
HaLow:
- "high" data rate over shorter range, though much higher range than 2.4 wifi
- data sharing between mobile groups like above, but high enough bandwidth for low quality video
Not much. While this is technically LoRa on 2.4GHz (which is not new), most people will associate LoRa with significantly longer range and LoRa 2.4 can do.
I know it’s all open source and I’m not paying for anything so I cant be choosy. But after playing with a bunch of Lora peer to peer chat systems. All I wish is a chat service that uses haloW. Since it uses wifi backend, regular wifi should work as well.
Cue xkcd on standards. I've been interested in mesh radio, and I keep hoping that a winner will emerge. Probably won't until a large commercial vendor gets interested and picks one.
Metricom Ricochet used dual-band radios, operating in 900MHz and 2.4GHz, to form a routable mesh that delivered internet access and other services, in 1999.
They used repeaters on street lights as part of the infrastructure, and even after the company went belly up people were able to use the repeaters for private networks. Pretty slick for the mid 90s.
The "100x bandwidth" claim needs to be substantiated.
There are some significant regulatory issues with the current popular mesh network protocols in the USA, namely that neither MeshCore or Meshtastic are compliant with the actual FCC regulations. 100x bandwidth because you're breaking the rules isn't the same as 100x bandwidth legally.
Here is the issue discussing this in the MeshCore repository: https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/issues/945
The issue you linked to is about MeshCore using channels that are too narrow. A mesh system claiming to offer 100x bandwidth is probably not violating regulations in that particular way.
There are more rules being broken. For example, overusing the frequency which effectively prevents others users from sending messages.
In the end, won't be used.
Capping off a pretty wild week for Meshcore: https://www.pedaldrivenprogramming.com/2026/05/meshcore-is-h...
TBH Meshtastic's code isn't great either. It's neat to play with but not robust.
It sucks how everything feels like a toy. I think meshtastic is the closest thing to a “product”. They made a bunch of bad architectural decisions that are haunting them now like how nodes broadcast its info.
It doesn't surprise me. This is a deep networking problem and very few CS people know anything about networking or how to design clean, fast, low-overhead network protocols and systems.
If IP were designed today the packets would have 500+ bytes of plain text JSON as headers and the spec would support hundreds of extensions.
Is there a better designed mesh project like those two getting built that you know of? Reticulum?
Correct me if I am wrong but I thought the primary appeal of LoRa was range? Also isn't the primary factor in making long range radio go through things is the frequency? So 2.4ghz is the same frequency as consumer wifi right and thus would propagate about the same right?
It doesn't seem like this would be that useful except that the protocol is LoRa so you can have higher bandwidth between two devices if they happen to be close enough together.
LoRa would go much farther than Wifi on 2.4ghz. Lora uses Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) modulation while wifi uses OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing). The first being designed for extreme range while the latter for bandwidth. At 2.4ghz you could probably get LoRa connections up to 6 miles with the right antenna height.
6 miles seems a very optimistic estimation: 2.4Ghz propagation is very reduced by obstacles like buildings or trees and at that frequency the atmospheric water (fog, rain, humidity) have a big impact on propagation. And you need also to consider that 2.4Ghz is a very polluted band, then the noise floor is significatevly higher than in the 865/915 Mhz. Moreover at 2.4Ghz the Fresnel window is smaller and the risk of multipath fading is higher.
Just use Unifi Airfiber for 6 miles at gigabit speeds. If you're relying on line of sight then 2.4GHz is nonsense.
And if you don't have line of sight then no you're not getting 6 miles
> would propagate about the same right?
No. Free space loss increases with frequency.
FSP loss for 915 MHz at 10 kms is ~ -111.67 dB while for 2.4 GHz is -120 dB.
That is a 9 dB loss which is significant. It could mean the difference between a copy or just plain static though the LoRa is supposed to be copyable down to -140 dBm.
The max tx power is around 150 mW (21.76 dBm), so at 10 kms, the RSSI is 21.76-120 = -98.24 dBm which is above the -140 dBm limit.
This calculation is assuming there is no loss due to vegetation or humidity or other barriers.
...or have line of sight at least. But yes higher frequencies have a bigger issue with this. A great mesh network for people who live on hill tops
"Going through things" isn't always necessary / is avoidable in some deployments. And 2.4GHz signals can propagate an okay distance between nodes if there aren't things to go through. (Globalstar's emergency SOS satellite constellation uses the n53 band, which is right above the 2.4GHz "wi-fi" band, and it propagates between handsets and LEO through 1400km of air just fine.)
So you could probably pull off a 2.4GHz mesh outdoors in rural areas? It'd be feasible in the same places a microwave-laser hilltop-to-hilltop link would, but instead of "fast but point-to-point" it's "slow but meshed" (and with much larger tolerance for slop — you don't need to put everything on fixed masts so they have perfect line-of-sight, you can just stick them on the tops of trees or whatever and if they wave in the wind it still works.)
Mind you, the authors' motivating use-case for the hardware seems to be their project (https://github.com/datapartyjs/MeshTNC) to (AFAICT) bridge LoRa (or some specific LoRa L2 protocol — Meshtastic, probably?) to packet radio, i.e. digital packet-switched signalling over amateur (HAM) radio bands.
In that context, the tradeoff of high throughput for low propagation makes sense. Insofar as you're working with LoRa, and want to build and experiment with a bunch of site-local devices that mesh between themselves and interoperate with LoRa data-link protocols, you'd likely be speaking something like LoRA over 2.4GHz (LoRa itself doesn't spec a way to do that, but you could make it happen within the closed ecosystem of your own home/office.)
And in that context, you could use a MeshTNC device as something like "LoRaLAN" router. It'd be something you'd keep somewhere central in your house (like a wi-fi router), plugged into power + an antenna (internal to your house, like a wi-fi router) and plugged into a packet-radio transceiver with its own even-bigger antenna, outside your house. (Like a wi-fi router being plugged into a gateway modem on its upstream WAN port.)
This MeshTNC device would then pick up signals from:
- regular LoRaWAN IoT devices and Meshtastic handsets in your building
- more custom devices in your building†, that you've built yourself, that use another MeshTNC module; where these other devices do their part of the meshing only on the 2.4GHz band, which means they don't need big fiddly external antennas like LoRa devices do, but can be quite compact
- and possibly, a separate bidirectional LoRa repeater (made from any existing "high-gain" LoRa module, i.e. the kind used in mains-powered LoRaWAN base stations) — which brings in LoRa mesh traffic from outside your building, and picks up and carries away "destined for elsewhere in this area" LoRa mesh traffic that your "LoRaLAN" device has emitted (either due to forwarding it from your 2.4GHz-only mesh handsets/devices, or due to forwarding it after receiving it from packet radio.)
Though keep in mind you only need that complexity for the 2.4GHz-only mesh devices, since there isn't an existing mesh to forward those packets. But this whole setup is still also a regular LoRa mesh, and so you can still use regular LoRa (e.g. meshtastic) handsets, and put out packets that make their way through your regional mesh, back to the packet-radio bridge in your building; and from there to who-knows-where.
† To be clear, the 2.4GHz mesh handsets would only work reliably inside your building (if the 2.4GHz antenna is inside your building); but knowing HAMs, half the point would be seeing how far away you could get from your house/office and have your 2.4GHz mesh handsets keep working. (You'd probably want to have a second MeshTNC "base station" with a building-external antenna to try that. Pleasantly, that doesn't complicate the topology; it's all still just mesh, so you can just drop that in.)
How are they increasing the bandwidth? It's a hardware limitation of the radios. Even if you run the lowest spread factor (SF) and highest bandwidth setting on the radio, it's still not great. And the radio buffer is 255 bytes. I'm also curious why they're starting a new project with the SX1276 instead of SX1262.
Seems like this would support institutional/campus environments or changing environments where the sensors at the edge are sending higher bandwidth ultimately back to an Internet node using LoRA mesh--instead of directional WiFi?
I'm trying to envision the application of a mesh like this. These could be examples?
- interconnected nodes need to share data (like images)
- interconnected nodes are acting as a collective array of sensors (eg. geolocation)
- interconnected mesh nodes provide redundant pathways back to the central node
- interconnected mesh nodes provide spatial diversity in case of interference or jamming
- nodes are mobile (eg. drone or vehicle) and mesh provides alternative connectivity based on node location and RF attenuation (also provides longer range with mesh connectivity)
I’m guessing it’s just haloW without the licensing requirements.
Gonna reply here, but this isn't about you or this post:
HN has a lot of us that have ~0 idea what you'd use this for, even when we steelman, all we can do is vaguely handwave about easier to setup wireless internet on a vast compound we own.
Would be really cool if someone could hop in and just give a couple one off examples, i guess? Only other one handwave I can think of is IOT x assembly line stuff for businesses, but I'm real curious why individuals are so into it -- or maybe they're not, and that's why the codebase quality is so poor? Idk.
You'll read a lot of illusions and wishful intentions.
In the end: LoRa is only good for very short text messages at somewhat long distance (up to 10km without special setup) and without bad conditions (obstacles on line of sight, rain/fog). There is an ongoing fight between each of the two frequencies to be used as default and this publication adds another frequency into the battle.
There is WiFi HaLow, a relatively new WiFi protocol which seems to solve the low bandwidth issues with LoRa on relatively confortable distance (likely up to 8km, same as with LoRa in regards to Line of Sight), albeit slightly less affected by weather conditions. The advantage here is permitting to send images and binary data in general, but think about something being sent at the speed levels from 2005 (which in any case is good speed for most usable things).
Then there are other relevant mesh protocols yet to mention here like ESPnow which is my personal favorite. Whereas the other two options above are exotic and with transceivers around the 50 EUR and above. With ESPnow you just need any cheap ESP32 embedded device with an optional antenna to increase range for about 3 EUR (antenna included). With that you get similar returns to WiFi HaLow with less range (about 3 kilometers max on my experiments) but cheap like heck.
To setup internet on a vast compound, WiFi HaLow might be a good investment. If you are with a constrained budget, then ESP32 is your friend. To remember, long distance is limited so if you are considering more than 8 devices exchanging heavy data, you should just go for proper WiFi long range transmitters.
Assuming you mean mesh in general: Meshtastic like projects
- emergency communication
- low power data transfer for sensors
- low data rate data transfer for mobile groups. Air softers use it to transmit information to each other while playing.
HaLow:
- "high" data rate over shorter range, though much higher range than 2.4 wifi - data sharing between mobile groups like above, but high enough bandwidth for low quality video
- large area wifi deployments
Propagation (FSPL) is a lot better at 868/915 Mhz than 2.4Ghz. What is the advantage to have a "super BLE", that can propagate for few hundred meters?
Not much. While this is technically LoRa on 2.4GHz (which is not new), most people will associate LoRa with significantly longer range and LoRa 2.4 can do.
I know it’s all open source and I’m not paying for anything so I cant be choosy. But after playing with a bunch of Lora peer to peer chat systems. All I wish is a chat service that uses haloW. Since it uses wifi backend, regular wifi should work as well.
Sounds like a solution to a problem already solved by DECT NR+ -- a 5G technology that is 'subscription free'.
Sending photos on meshtastic
How does this compare to Meshtastic, MeshCore and Bitchat?
Doesn't. That is like comparing the network connection with apps.
Network doesn't usually care much about the apps running on top of it.
Cue xkcd on standards. I've been interested in mesh radio, and I keep hoping that a winner will emerge. Probably won't until a large commercial vendor gets interested and picks one.
100x of what? As someone not too familiar with LoRa, what is the significance and how this could be used?
Say I start the node and then what?
Every day, we get closer to reinventing Ricochet, 27 years later...
What does an Internet communication app that have to do with a mesh radio protocol?
Metricom Ricochet used dual-band radios, operating in 900MHz and 2.4GHz, to form a routable mesh that delivered internet access and other services, in 1999.
Ah, thanks, I didn't find any reference to that from a search (found a messaging app).
They used repeaters on street lights as part of the infrastructure, and even after the company went belly up people were able to use the repeaters for private networks. Pretty slick for the mid 90s.
Ricochet was a mesh internet provider.
nice to not see some non-ai titles
You mean content?