[tlrobinson]

NYC Mesh and similar networks use point-to-point relatively high bandwidth links (e.x. Ubiquiti radios commonly used by WISPs)

Disaster.radio uses LoRa which is very low bandwidth and typically omnidirectional antennas. It only uses WiFi to connect users’ “terminal” devices to the node within a short range.

[juuul]

Yes! To expand on this a bit, disaster.radio locally hosts web apps, e.g. a vector tile map of the local area, and serves them up over WiFi to local devices with a reasonable bandwidth, then uses the very low bandwidth of LoRa to share points on the map added by users over long distances (e.g. where you can get water, food, etc).

disaster.radio is not a replacement to a existing internet infrastructure like NYC Mesh. Setting up a high bandwidth mesh network is a lot of work. Each node needs a non-trivial amount of power (enough to make solar hard) and nodes generally need line of sight which requires good mounting locations and planning.

We, the creators of disaster.radio, actually also run a small wifi-based mesh network https://peoplesopen.net/ and the idea for disaster.radio came out of frustration with difficulty of mounting wifi nodes (finding interested people in good locations, then negotiating with landlords for permission to mount on rooftops and running ethernet cable for PoE into building, then finding another location within line of sight and repeating the process). We thought: What if we could make a "mesh throwie" where installation was as easy as throwing it on a roof (and maybe strapping it to something).