[DoctorOetker]

I never understood the popularity of these protocols, because when I looked at the legal duty cycles and multiplied that by time in a day and instantaneous bitrate, the result was a disappointing amount of data per day...

So many spectrum rules are totally weird though: should they be interpreted per radio device? or per user?

What -apart from cost- prevents a user who wants more bandwidth from installing 10 devices in parallel and alternate each radio so none of the radios exceed their allowed transmit duty cycle?

[mapt]

These things aren't "Internet Access", they're an easy way to get service that is bandwidth-equivalent to SMS, MMS, IRC or walkie talkie, over complex and distant terrain, without any central coordinating authority. Potentially even acting as last-mile to repeater nodes that pass through the actual Internet. This is a terrifically useful idea of a network in certain conditions, though in other conditions it's probably just going to be last-mile for your personal Gmail account.

[DoctorOetker]

I didn't assume "internet access", even for machine 2 machine applications, it was a disappointingly low bandwidth.

I don't deny a niche of applications, I tried to understand its popularity, and back then I came to the conclusion it was probably illicit use of the technology, not conformant use.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

The people I know playing around with it are interested in something that offers very basic SMS style broadcast without any centralized authority or infrastructure.

For example here on the west coast we have a non trivial probability of earthquakes big enough that a lot of infrastructure may be down for weeks.

Another motivation is political. We've already seen efforts to restrict people's ability to warn others about ICE's activity. So I know some people that while not going full revolutionary or anything, are interested to learn about some peer 2 peer alternatives as a sort of hedge against things getting worse.

And some people just play with it because the tech is neat, it's fun to see how far your messages can get, etc.

[pstuart]

I'd assume that the ability to communicate without depending on cellular service could have a certain appeal.

[davemp]

> What -apart from cost- prevents a user who wants more bandwidth from installing 10 devices in parallel and alternate each radio so none of the radios exceed their allowed transmit duty cycle?

Folks with badges knocking on the user’s door. It is pretty trivial to locate stationary signals.

[andruby]

The point they are making is that if the limit is _per device_ than using 10 devices doesn't break the rules.

[davemp]

The FCC or whoever is almost 100% just looking at power/time/location. Those 10 devices will look like 1 device.

[DoctorOetker]

when would the 10 radios be sufficiently spaced to count as separate devices?

[Zigurd]

Law enforcement that isn't solving 50% of murders also isn't looking for exotic crimes unless there's a lot of money in it for them.

[UltraSane]

Meshtastic routing is also completely broken.

[adev_]

> Meshtastic routing is also completely broken.

I am curious about that.

What is in particular broken ?

Any reason why Meshtastic is not using a well specified / tested a mesh aware routing protocol like BATMAN [1] ?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.A.T.M.A.N.

[wtallis]

I suspect protocols like B.A.T.M.A.N. would consume all available LoRa airtime just with neighbor discovery. On Meshtastic, nodes announcing their presence more than once per hour is seen as unnecessarily talkative.

I also don't think it's possible to make Meshtastic into the kind of reliable and high-performance mesh network some users want without effectively dropping support for most battery-powered devices by requiring much more frequent transmissions to maintain connectivity and participation in the mesh.

[adev_]

> I also don't think it's possible to make Meshtastic into the kind of reliable and high-performance mesh network some users want without effectively dropping support for most battery-powered devices

Interesting.

Zigbee has this distinction between router node and non-router node.

Routers are active members of the mesh (relay). Non-routers are just clients.

Most battery devices in Zigbee acts generally as non-router.

It is surprising that Meshtastic did not follow this pattern. Zigbee is not a young protocol.

[sandos]

Meshtastic did, in a way. There are roles and settings to disable rebroadcasts, then you are effectively a client. And it is used to preserve battery.