Althea started out with a similar pitch. I'm not sure where they are now<p><a href="https://althea.net/how-it-works" rel="nofollow">https://althea.net/how-it-works</a>
I have an idea for a bunch of low powered nodes that make an sms analog, a bbs and an ebook library available during natural disasters. It'd be nifty to allow communities to communicate during extended disasters, where 4g towers can often lose their backup power.<p>I would love it if one of these mesh wifi projects really made it somewhere. That would be very convenient for this project.
If the frequencies used are above the plasma frequency of the ionosphere (typically >30 MHz) like here then the only solution to "mesh" or cell networks is line of sight and that only comes from height above terrain. And height above terrain, except in rare and unique cases, is always expensive.<p>The only reason cell networks work is that the telcos pay big money for getting access, power, and backhaul to places up high. No amount of power increases, modulation gain, reflector aperture, software, or anything else you can think up is going to get around the lack of line of sight.<p>Unless a decentralized mesh network has enough money to do this it will only ever work in specific regions where single individuals or groups can pay $$$ and cover large areas. Like in Seattle where the mountainous coastal terrain is useful for hamwan's network, or in mega-cities like New York where residents have skyscraper roof access for p2p wireless community ISPs.
I feel like every such project should be asked to justify its existence by explaining why it's not actually identical to some other similar project. Reviewing the existing literature might save a lot of repeated work.<p>Even if the answer is "the community that runs this one is friendlier", hey, that's a valid differentiation, okay. But seriously, there are ten bazillion wireless meshes now, what makes this one worthy of anyone's attention or effort?
Helium is taking off in the IOT space. I am not sure if it can be used for regular communication like messaging or not, but that would be amazing if it could. <a href="https://www.helium.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.helium.com/</a>
Mesh is what we can look to when we don't have (reliable) Internet, for when we're in places that don't have Internet, and/or for people who don't have the resources to get on the Internet.<p>Rust is not something we're going to be running on low power Pi-type boards in trees, or on the kind of hardware that's available to people with very limited resources.<p>So why write software in a language that isn't meant for and can't be compiled on modest hardware?