Technology

This tech would be great if we had high power nodes all across the globe. But we do not. Maybe a cool idea could be encrypted data over FM radio. The radio stations already exist and are a dying business. Nonprofits could buy up radio stations and rebroadcast data broadly and only those with the encryption keys could decrypt. Cut the ISP out entirely. Like the difference between a local call and a long distance call.

Meshtastic communication would prioritize local hops where they are available and then where there are spans of area without nodes, they could hop across radio broadcasts.

Primary issue would be speed. Next to no bandwidth on a signal like that. Kbps not Mbps. Perhaps an incentive for much better compression as well.

Queue IT Crowd episode...

So, I setup meshtastic.

Put an antenna on my roof.

Have a decent number of mesh radios. Put one in each car in relay mode.

Setup a locally run LLM and made an interface to it.

Working on setting up a BBS.

I'm in the high density suburbs, I can, when the weather is just right, reach a single node that doesn't seem to be able to reach any other nodes.

If I go on a drive, I can see 5-10 nodes.

Adoption in the mid-Atlantic US is just so damn low, it's not really usable.

We need some antennas up high, but there aren't any reasonable options around me.

The internet will get back up if it goes down. It is very decentralized. Sea cables and DNS is where most of the centralization occurs, and DNS going down is not at all the end of the internet. How man sea cables have to be broken at once for the internet to break, I'm not entirely sure.

Meshtastic is a cool thing and it is very useful, internet up or down.

What time zone?

So much of our infrastructure uses the internet now that if it goes down I wouldn't be shocked if electric grids, healthcare, shopping, public transport, etc also shit the bed.

I am literally building a network in my town. Love this project, so much fun and useful

How resilient is something like Meshtastic? My understanding is that anyone can configure their device poorly so that it can become overly chatty, congesting the network. Even in ideal an ideal scenario with properly configured nodes, could this actually survive if it saw more than hobbiest adoption?

I think it's really cool and i like having this idea of a backup communication system, but if has serious range limitations and is likely to be overwhelmed in a no-cell scenario is it even worth it, or is it just fun to play around with?

I've not been recycling my tin cans and I have a whole shitload of string. Happy to share.