[brk]

The meshcore software, and the common hardware being used, are both comically weak for anything that approaches usage at scale, especially in an emergency situation.

The range is extremely limited, and the throughput gets really bad if your packets have to travel more than a few hops. These two factors alone combine to write this off as nothing more than a toy pretty much from the start.

There are already unlicensed radios with longer range that would be a better starting point if people were trying to position mesh* as a scalable and reliable transport of any kind.

>Second, the author also misses an important piece of functionality of meshcore: If I lose power, the mesh still works.

This point isn't unique to meshcore, and it is not a guarantee. Any solar powered and battery-backed device can function without utility power (in theory). Meshcore nodes are not solar powered by default, and the same solar power concept can be utilized for any other kind of radio transceiver/protocol.

[MomsAVoxell]

Well, someone is a negative nelly.

>comically weak

This has been said about every interchange technology, ever. Doesn’t matter, still EOF’ed.

>trying to position mesh* as a scalable and reliable transport of any kind.

.. well, scale is a matter of one thing: location, location, location ...

>range

.. is an end-user value decision, as in, you might think its too slow for your browsing needs, but there are a thousand applications that will use the bandwidth offered to the average user, at the average users own personal speed, according to the needs of the average user.

Just like in the good ol’ days of soggy noodle internetworking, the current zeitgeist apropos mesh-based local low-power radio technology, is entirely ruled by the user.

Case in point: some friends and I have deployed our own small Meshtastic network, and we use it exclusively to organize our social network. This particular use case isn’t particularly ‘easily’ exploitable by third parties, since we have some modicum of encryption - but it certainly supports our need here and now in a big city - but, more importantly some of us will take the little lovely boxes with them when they go sailing next week, and our range will be significantly extended for the purpose …

>Meshcore nodes are not solar powered by default, and the same solar power concept can be utilized for any other kind of radio transceiver/protocol.

If you need solar, build a meshcore node with solar.

Nay-saying like this is as old as the hills, there’s nothing special about it, everyone does it…

[ramses0]

Huge +1 here! Work out scenario planning of Meshtastic/Meshcore with one of the GPT's and they top out at like ~100k users and like 10msg/sec or something ludicrously low.

At something like $100/node and 5000 nodes in a major metro (eg: Dallas) it's like a $500k investment and you're maxed out at low data rates and saturated topology.

That's 5k nodes in a (generous) 5 million population and ~500 square mile area. More like 9M people and 9000 square miles. (I checked, and that's "extended metroplex", but reasonable: Decatur to Cleburne, Weatherford to Kaufman).

At 5k nodes saturating an area, it's basically a rich persons toy very well suitable to remote or low-density areas, but NEVER for 1:1 saturation deployment in any sort of high density area.