Start your own Internet Resiliency Club
(bowshock.nl)470 points by todsacerdoti 12 hours ago
470 points by todsacerdoti 12 hours ago
I only ever flash via CLI or via "drag & drop" method. The web flasher is great for first-timers but there are 100%-offline methods for all the devices.
The android client .apk can be downloaded directly from github at https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-Android/releases
I do agree though, I feel there should be more effort to support "long term lack of internet" use case.
Hearing this is exciting to me, because it is a very concrete and actionable target for a true “local-first” ecosystem and infrastructure.
I was very disappointed to find that the “local-first” manifesto was not the “local-first” as I understood it. In my mind, I should be able to connect an app on my phone to another phone via bluetooth, and sync without going through a central server. However, it makes very little economic sense, if someone is building a SAAS product that locks customers into dependencies on a central server where services can be metered and billed. To my mind, those are “offline-first”.
I have thought about what it would take to build a local-first software forge and package distribution, and yet, I couldn’t see a good reason to expend that effort. We have a lot of the pieces … with this example — if we want to be able to expand a meshtastic network _after_ a disaster, then the whole tooling, development, etc. needs to be local-first and resilient.
I tested meshtastic in a major european city with pretty much 100% mesh coverage and its real life performance was quite underwhelming. Often I would receive messages that I could not reply to because of differences in antenna gain and crappy mesh performance. Public chat was either completely dead or flooded with test messages. Everything was super slow because the mesh can’t actually scale that well and craps out with more than a 100 nodes. Even medium fast channel would clog up fast. I would never depend on meshtastic during an emergency because it barely works even when nobody is using it. I think a public wifi mesh would be more worthwhile. Older used wifi routers are pretty much free and in unlimited supply. They use very little power. Everyone already has a compatible client device on their pocket. Sure the mesh would fail during a total blackout but at least it would be useful for something when the power is up.
I agree with this assessment. I've been running two nodes for about a year, maybe longer, and in that time, I've only had perhaps two contacts.
Even with a YAGI or a dedicated pole antenna, both tuned to 868 MHz, the range in my location is quite poor. The signal seems to drop off quickly, even after walking just a kilometer down the road. While I understand that height is key (and my antennas are fairly high), it appears that 868 MHz attenuates very rapidly.
So, to reiterate, I don't believe Meshtastic is a particularly effective solution. The principle behind it is sound, but the practical execution falls short. I think established methods like Hamnet and traditional amateur radio are far superior, especially now with SDRs making a simple handheld radio incredibly affordable (around €20)
Have you tried the Reticulum network? https://reticulum.network
I have been meaning to try it out
Yeah, having gone through the blackout in Spain this would be really useful (using phones).
Then only one person needs a generator and/or Starlink to provide some connectivity.
It's interesting how we're generally headed towards general self sufficiency, off grid solar and wind power with batteries because the grid won't pay you to sell it electricity, mesh networks and satellite internet to get around lazy local ISPs. All we need is a field where robots grow food and we're back in the middle ages but with modern tech. We've even got tech billionaires to stand in as feudal lords and crazy right wing populists instead of inbred kings with weird chins.
> It's interesting how we're generally headed towards general self sufficiency, off grid solar and wind power with batteries because the grid won't pay you to sell it electricity
The grid will definitely pay you to sell it electricity if you fulfill the industrial standards it expects.
The issue in your assessment is that the quality of service provided by someone just setting up solar panels and inverters and plugging that on the grid is the equivalent of starting a skyscraper building company based on your experience building your garden shed. It's not safe, you won't understand why, and eventually you or someone else will get hurt.
Yeah solarpunk is probably the most neglected out of all existing sci-fi punks, probably cause it's actually kinda nice and doesn't make a good setting for a gritty depressing story?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FabFi
https://web.archive.org/web/20111119205258/http://fabfi.fabf...
I had worked with this almost 15 years ago. It was a neat project.
I'm surprised that phone manufacturers haven't already implemented a mesh network. I guess you could kind of call Apple's Find My network one, but if you want to smuggle arbitary data the bandwidth is very low. Maybe Apple's new mobile Wi-Fi chip is a precursor to an actual Internet mesh network.
I don't think they themselves need to implement it. During the Hong Kong protests in 2019 they used apps like Bridgefy.
Blackberry had one, but it didn't seem to be a feature consumers particularly cared about when they fled to iPhones.
That is by design to keep you engaged. My current phone has 7050 mah and 80w charging. I charge it twice per week or so. If you have a slightly chaotic life you have to consider charging 30 times per day, hoard cables and charge powerbanks only to have it die anyway. Now I have one cable that doesn't move and doesn't break.
Meshtatisc's routing is extremely primitive and inefficient.
https://www.disk91.com/2024/technology/lora/critical-analysi...
> One of my nightmares is waking up one morning and discovering that the power is out, the internet is down, my cell phone doesn’t work
I dunno.... as I get older, this sounds more and more idyllic
I see the sarcasm but you're likely not simulating this hard enough. This is what happened in most of Spain and Portugal during the recent power outage and it wasn't pretty.
I guess it depends on your perspective. Here in Portugal, lots of people ended up sitting on their patios, chatting with friends, cooking on the grill, playing cards, sipping wine, and generally having a pretty good time. There was a collective groan around the small village where I live when the power came back on, and quite a few people commented that they were disappointed that they'd have to work in the morning.
> and quite a few people commented that they were disappointed that they'd have to work in the morning
Hangover from the port.
Instead of doing drugs or chatting, I'd read a book on my Kobo.
The thing with the stuff you mentioned. I already drank enough alcohol jn my life to not bother with it anymore. Same with card games. And random chitchat.
The power grid went down in a large area of the US about 20 years ago. The biggest issue I saw was the gas pumps didn't work. Cars were lined up, many abandoned, just waiting for the power to come on some they could get gas. I was in college at the time, but home for a few days. I heard rumors that the power was on west of us (where my school was), so I just started driving west, hoping I found where the power was on before I ran out of gas. Thankfully, that worked out.
But if the power, and the gas stations, don't work anywhere. It won't take long before we start running out of food and other utilities start to fail.
It’s absurd that we don’t require gas stations to have generators on-site. They have all the fuel they need to power them right there!!!
Now nobody else can get more fuel for their generators when the gas stations don’t have power either.
This was a big issue during the power shutoffs during LA fires this year.
Think the some of the worst of it was for people stuck in elevators. Don’t have exact numbers but there were A LOT of them. Emergency services were very busy freeing people. My wife was stuck on a train and that wasn’t so great either. Toilets overflowed, ran out of water, eventually evacuated and walked to the previous station. They were lucky to be only a couple km away.
It also wasn't so incredibly nasty, though. There were disruptions and some arrests, but the large majority of people were in the streets socializing, dancing, doing impromptu things they wouldn't be doing on a work day.
That's because they kinda expected everything to be back to normal in a few hours. If there would be some more catastrophic distributed outage there would probably be less dancing.
Cooking, refrigeration and water pumping depends on electric power. It can definitely get nasty if it lasts for more than a day
Only because it didn't last overnight and wasn't at the peak of summer.
Otherwise you're throwing out all fresh food, supermarkets couldn't process payments nor most restaurants either, etc.
Did you check with hospitals, prisons and daycares how things went?
To perhaps add a dimension to the issue, imagine that one day you woke up and the roads were not functional. Many people would have a great time, as long as they knew the roads were going to be functional later that day. If it turned into a longer problem, the disruption would have vast and unpleasant consequences.
We do not yet have an awareness of our dependence on technologies, nor of how fragile those technologies can be. If someone had suggested years ago that perhaps we should prepare for a disruption in say, the egg supply, that would have provoked laughter. And jokes like, well I really don't like eggs. Or what about toilet paper hoarding? Given just those two events alone, one might decide that disruptions are at least somewhat of a possibility. That our past assumptions of an unending supply of goods and services might not hold in the future.
It is a funny comment, and there are several dependencies I personally would not miss. Until I did.
Personally, the interesting concept is resiliency in general.
> To perhaps add a dimension to the issue, imagine that one day you woke up and the roads were not functional. Many people would have a great time, as long as they knew the roads were going to be functional later that day. If it turned into a longer problem, the disruption would have vast and unpleasant consequences.
To be fair, this is a real scenario for people in snowy/and or rural areas. It isn't uncommon for people in my area of Canada to get snowed in for a few days.
You're right, of course. Notice I edited out the Swan Lake reference in my quote - https://www.npr.org/2021/08/19/1029437787/in-1991-soviet-cit...
I feel like the better path to resiliency is not persistent radio connections between hobbyists on other sides of the state but rather intermittent ones between people on opposite sides of the bus and an application layer that arranges for people who are heading that way anyhow to carry "internet" traffic on a filesystem in their pocket.
You just get a different type of threat landscape when each hop is also an opportunity to shake somebody's hand and attest that the holder of their private key is a real human. It creates a minimal trust layer you can then build on. You don't get that with a hardware address found drifting on the wind.
Both modes have some potential to attract harmful attention to network operators based on the behavior of their users, but to a very different degree. So far as I know nobody is kicking down meshtastic operators' doors looking to follow a transmission to its source, but I think that would change if the other modes of long range skulduggery were to fail.
The most resilient infrastructure would be one with no high value targets: one where each user is equally an operator.
nncp [1, 2] is probably the best Sneakernet tool I've found. It's very UNIX-y which makes it pretty hard to operate if you're not technical but would also make it pretty easy to wrap around with a UI. You have to explicitly add a list of "neighbors" to your configuration and you can send "packets" either by spooling to file or using a TCP/Noise connection. You can also send data hop-by-hop and is e2e encrypted.
...and it's close relative NNTP. There was a whole distribution structure built out of intermittent data transmission. We've had the tools for this stuff for a long time, we've just switched to centralized, always available services because that's easier to build a company around.
This idea sounds a lot like Secure Scuttlebutt[0]. I'm not sure the state of it. The client they link to on their website ceased development awhile ago.
I think that secure scuttlebutt (SSB) is a very good start, but eventually we'll need something besides an append-only log. Something that removes data that is no longer interesting. Something that, when it runs up against its storage quota, prunes data based on whether it is more/less trusted or likely to be interesting to a peer. Something that knows which peers I'm likely to be near in the future, knows which topics they're subscribed to, and which tries to be an efficient mailman based on that understanding.
But yeah, my vision is pretty much just SSB all grown up.
America is sprawling, unfortunately. That kind of approach would work in cities, but would be much less effective where people aren't taking the bus or even being around other people on a daily basis.
The advantage of something that can reach 6 miles is that it could cover suburbia and rural areas with ~20-40 acre plots relatively effectively.
Yeah it's not ideal for sparse populations but I think you could get a lot of coverage by just running a node with a solar panel wherever your mailbox is and also having your mail driver put a node in their vehicle.
Really the thing I'm trying to push back against is the idea that the entire path between them must be connected all at once in order for two parties to communicate. If we design for short range, partition-tolerant, pocket-to-pocket background gossip, then that same protocol will work just fine if you attach specialty radio hardware and give it miles worth of range, and you've still got the fallback ready for cases where all you have is consumer grade hardware.
On the other hand, if you design for persistent connectivity and then try to use it in an intermittently-connected context, you're going to have a much worse time.
> to carry "internet" traffic on a filesystem in their pocket. What do you mean?
Well "internet" gets quotes because if the source and the destination are disconnected when the message arrives then they're not on the internet.
It might look something like this: As you stand in line at the grocery store your device notices that a nearby device (the guy behind you) belongs to somebody who is trusted by one of your peers in the "gardening" topic. You're not a gardener, but your room mate is. So your device pulls a gardening related update from their device. Then as you head home with groceries your device is not connected to anything, it's just sitting in your pocket with a filesystem full of data. And then when you get home your roommate's device gets a notification about a reply to their question on a gardening related message board. That data came to them on your device. It traveled a few feet wirelessly at the grocery store, and a few feet wirelessly at home, but the majority of the transit was handled the slow way, by hitching a ride on a human who was traveling that way anyhow.
It would only work for small bits of latency tolerant data, and work best for information of broad interest (not so great for an encrypted email to a single party, pretty good for map tiles, open/closed hours, restaurant menus, etc). The simplest app to build on such a platform would be a sort of of distributed BBS. VoIP would be nearly impossible. But I think that small snippets of high latency text can get you pretty far.
Mesh radio bandwidth is pretty poor. Firstly, you have to compete with many interferers (albeit this might get better if the power goes down), including other LoRa radios, but more to the point, long-distance connections consume bandwidth and aquire delay and delay variation at every intermediate hop. It might be reasonable to use it for text messaging, but with per-hop bandwidth ranging from 0.3 kbps to 27 kbps, which will get divided down further over shared multi-hop links it will be impractical to use it for anything else except perhaps very-low-bandwidth telephony over short distances or visiting minimalist text-only websites.
It might make more sense if augmented by fixed multi-megabit point-to-point microwave radio links to act as a backbone, with LoRa only functioning as an access network.
I'd be interested to hear what experiences people have had with doing this for real.
I think the point of the article is not to use that mesh network as a replacement for internet. I think the author's idea is that the mesh network would provide the "resilience club" a communication channel while they work on recovering the regular internet.
I've just realised I've talked my way into the idea of creating per-city club-operated backbone networks based on something like 100 Mbit point-to-point Ethernet-over-microwave links. With tall buildings as hubs, you might actually be able to build a decent mesh, with WiFi, LoRa or both acting as access networks. You'd definitely want to throttle per-client bandwidth to prevent people from abusing your very limited long-range mesh bandwidth. None of this would be cheap; decent microwave links cost thousands, and you'd need backup solar and battery power for every part of the network.
I'd also consider thinking about using the "big ears, small mouth" technique to push up bandwidth; if a fixed link using a technology such as LoRa could transmit at a legal EIRP level, but coupled this with a really high gain parabolic dish (I'm thinking re-purposed satellite dishes) and low-noise amplifier at each end on the receive side, you could get substantially higher end-to-end Eb/No, and thus much higher bandwidth and range than would otherwise be legally possible. At first glance, the necessary hardware to do this looks quite doable, either by active RF switching between antennae, or the use of a hybrid/circulator to do the necessary duplexing. I'd be interested to see if anyone has already built, or even manufactures, something like this, and what the practical and regulatory barriers are to implementation.
"Big ears, small mouth" is exactly what the regulations are designed to encourage, so I don't foresee regulatory issues.
You don't even need extra hardware for the duplexing; the common SX1276 chip has separate Tx and Rx pins which are typically combined on the PCB. All you need is to route a PCB that brings 'em out separately, if that's what you want to do.
In practice it's tricky to aim two dishes the exact same place, so using a single dish with a single antenna at its focus is probably quite a bit more practical. The SX1276 also has a PA control pin, invert that and you've got your LNA control signal. Or don't bother with the LNA, and simply mount the transceiver at the focus to minimize RF feedline losses. You'd give up a smidgen of performance but gain a lot of simplicity. (There would still be coax running down the boom, but it would be carrying the wifi/bluetooth signal outside the dish's aperture!)
I didn't know about the chip having separate TX and RX pins. There must be a gap in the market for rooftop-to-rooftop LoRa transceivers that don't cost a fortune. Even using something like a 24 dB gain antenna would push range up by a factor of 10 relative to a simple 4 dB antenna, or get a substantial improvement in bandwidth/reliability at the same range. For an even simpler design, you could just put a 20 dB attenuator between the transmit port and the antenna, reducing the effective forward gain of 4 dB, while getting the full 24 dB in the opposite direction. Proper RF engineering details an exercise for the student etc.
Mesh networks are the foundation - they are essential to disaster resilience. Then what services to run over them ?
Real time chat: wild unsecure simplicity proven to run anywhere (IRC), bells & whistles with contemporary security (Matrix), some mesh native that almost no one knows ? What about post-disaster onboarding of actual users ?
Store & forward messaging: SMTP & friends may work nicely, but with actually distributed servers - in each local disaster POP. Also needs timeout and retry parameters to keeping stuff in queues practically forever.
Forums: anything better than ol' NNTP ? Other protocols merely adopted intermittent indirect connectivity - NNTP was born in it !
Is anything more sophisticated or more interactive realistic for actual disaster ?
An onboarding kit with clients for each major OS (à la AOL CDROM !) might be handy too, for snearkernet distribution over USB dongles.
Post-disaster onboarding is complicated by app store lockdowns and the difficulty of sideloading. Heck, even establishing plain http or self-signed https connections is tricky on phones now.
I'm sure someone smarter than me has a toolkit for these things, I just don't know where to find it.
Store-and-forward-wise, NNCP is designed for this, but it's not widespread yet.
I was just thinking about this sort of thing the other day. Thinking if I need a techno 'bug out' bag, my Macs would be the most useless ones to waste the weight on because if anything happened I'd never be able to reinstall macOS without phoning home to Apple for an activation.
Trouble is a Linux-on-a-key that you've never used before, is still a long way from being productive without a network to install all the packages you actually want to use.
It takes me about a month after a reinstall or new machine, to feel like I've really spread my wings and have everything installed that I initially forgot about. So I guess the recommendation would be "daily-drive it for a month before refrigerating it". And at that point, you might as well just make it your everyday machine.
I think the point of the article is not to use that mesh network as a replacement for internet. I think the author's idea is that the mesh network would provide the "resilience club" a communication channel while they work on recovering the regular internet.
The real "resilience teams" are going to be at the telcos/ISPs, and they will have dark fibre between their networks and autonomous backup power in their data centres. They will be able to do IRC, VoIP telephony, email, etc. between their networks over statically routed point-to-point IP between their local networks even if BGP and the transit networks go down so they can "black start" the Internet. (Back in my ISP days, I remember reading about there being a private telephone network just for AS operators' NOCs to talk to one another quite independenty of the PSTN.)
For anything that takes even those out (eg. a "Big One" quake in California), you fall back to radio hams and autonomous radio links for the disaster services.
For grid-down data my preference would be laser instead of RF as laser is regulated by the FDA and not the FCC not that either would take interest. With laser one could send incredibly large amounts of data very fast. It's more manual setup but I would expect once set up it would be far more reliable, better for setting up mountain top repeaters and meshes. Laser is also better for data privacy encryption aside as the beam is directed to a target vs. omnidirectional broadcasting. During grid-down most people that would be using a mesh would be at static locations. One could then bridge in these RF omnidirectional devices into the mountain and home repeaters to prevent over-saturation.
Another nifty feature of a manually positioned laser is the automatic measurement of time domain. One could have an optional security feature to automatically disable the data-stream if the time domain of the laser changes in physical distance of more than {n} user-defined meters or centimeters to prevent MitM (Monster in the Middle) beam interception for the extra properly paranoid types.
There can be weather issues for laser but for that one could fall back to voice using any one of the hundreds of makes and models of HAM gear that can operate on and around 11 meters by moving a jumper or holding down two buttons when it is powered on. Illegal but only enforced by monthly example of someone impacting revenue generating sites. Voice changers and scramblers FTW. RF signature ignored. Don't use sloppy SDR's. In a grid down event TLA's will be busy with higher priority issues and will "look into it" eventually by which point the transceivers mysteriously vanish assuming one can even get the TLA to show up.
This article makes more sense if its coming from a city where only the large telco's are present.
Here Dresden (Germany), there are several volunteer organisations who laid wires through the city or have microwave-antennas (AG DSN, Bürgernetz, Freifunk), and there is a recently founded internet exchange run by volunteers (DD-IX). So as long as we have power, we got our own internet.
OK but kind of outdated and incomplete. Meshcore is largely competing with Meshtastic nowadays: https://meshcore.co.uk/
To remember: LoRa only permits small text messages. Don't even think about images, voice nor binary files (I mean it).
Another option is APRS using satellite connections through a cheap chinese walkie-talkie (Quangsheng UV-K5) for 20 euros to send text messages.
What I don't get about Meshcore is... What's their goal. They seem a commercial venture, their contact email is customers@..... I don't know they're license... I rather use meshtastic.
I think their basic idea is to have a more advanced (and therefore scaleable mesh) where you can have more control over the path your packets take. I dont get the impression they are very commercial. Seems to been started by people first approaching meshtastic with proposed changes to the algo and getting rejected and therefore "forking" (forking in quotes because I dont think they share any code)
You could just about squeeze voice down LoRa with a really low-bandwidth codec, as really aggressive codecs can manage < 0.5 kbps. If you want to sacrifice voice quality but use standard codecs, the military MELPe codec has 600 bits/s as one of its standard modes.
If I go to https://meshcore.co.uk/about.html, the fact that there is two youtube videos there and not a button that says "Download Docs PDF" shows me exactly how serious they are about "[We] connect people and things, without using the internet"
Huh. Hadn’t heard of Meshcore before. Thanks for that. It sounds more organized than Meshtastic. Seems more polished, but also a bit more opaque (from my cursory examination). That may just be, because it’s not had as much time to get established. It has all the open credentials.
From her article:
> Their answer was both depressing and freeing: “You can’t. All you can do is be prepared with tools and a plan for when the crisis arrives. That’s when the organization will listen.”
That is so sad, but also, so true.
I was fortunate to have worked for a company that is over 100 years old, and that had weathered a couple of wars, depression, recession, market disruption, etc.
They were about as open to disaster planning as anyone, but they could also be head-in-the-sand knuckleheads. The biggest thing was the company had a fiscal and cultural conservative bent; quite unusual in the tech industry, these days.
Anyone that has managed a DR system, knows how difficult it is to get support. Disaster Recovery is expensive, resource-intensive, and difficult to test. It is also stuff people don’t want to think about. Sort of like insurance.
My suggestion as someone preparing for this kind of stuff since quite a while:
+ Quangsheng UV-K5 + Android phone with 3.5 mm audio jack + APRSdroid installed
Forget about LoRa, that is basically a toy. It is far more useful to have a functioning walkie talkie capable of talking with satellites and other stations at 50 kilometers of range.
The issue with satellite stuff, is that it’s pretty sensitive to active attack. It will be available for things like natural disasters, but not necessarily for war.
In either case, jamming is a possibility.
The problem with lora (and APRS over satellite... well, even ground APRS) is, that the bandwidth is very limited and usually only for "one person at a time", so while meshtastic/meshcore might be fine for tens of stations and a few users chatting, once those numbers get higher, the routing/signalization uses up most of the bandwidth, and many people sending messages at the same time makes the whole system very unreliable.
APRS is a bit better, because it requires ham licences and (usually) a bit more expensive equipment, but with "SmartBeaconing" and just a few hams, you get collisions (multiple people transmitting at the same time, effectively jamming eachother).
Reddit is usually full of preppers and other idiots buying these cheap chinese radios, usually without any knowledge and licences (that are needed to use them), and in turn they know nothing about actual use of those devices.... simplex range in urban environment is measured in hundreds of meters or maybe one or two large buildings between radioss, and repeaters will be in use by actual emergency servics and not really usable for any kind of "private use".
tldr: get a few books, a pack of cards, wait it out, not so long ago being unreachable away from home was the norm, and we managed.
On the other hand, getting a license is pretty easy. If you have a US address you can take 2 ten minute exams online for $10 to get General class; that's usable when traveling globally. It's a fixed pool of about 300 questions, so a half day of studying should be enough.
With the license, there are ham repeaters for FM and DMR. My cheap Chinese radio can reach the repeater 15km away.
It also supports APRS, but only for sending beacons. I can't really test it as there aren't repeaters around.
Please stop with the FUD.
Portugal was for 24 hours without electricity. LoRa networks were jammed and non-operational because the bandwidth is limited. APRS kept working.
It is far better to have a walkie-talkie that you can use as PMR on the 446 range and use for satellite text messages than an expensive toy that very few use.
And as you also know: You do NOT require a radio license when operating under emergency situations, which is the context on this case.
> And as you also know: You do NOT require a radio license when operating under emergency situations, which is the context on this case.
In portugal? Yes, you need one. Probably in every other EU country too
In USA too.
I have no idea where people got the myth of not needing a licence in emergencies, probably due to not reading the actual rules.
Also, you cannot use the same device for PMR and ham radio bands, the PMR device needs to be certified for PMR use, that means that it can only transmit on pmr frequencies and nowhere else. Other devices (eg. ham radio) cannot be used on PMR frequencies.
It's not FUD, it's regulation which exists for good reason, because in cases of actual emergencies, trained ham operators can assist actual emergency services with communication, and that's impossible if every idiot with a baofeng jams the channels.
I don't understand this fascination with networks that require special hardware to intermediate between end user nodes. Would be much nicer if things just ran, zero-click, via WiFi, on most common computers, netbooks and phones, pure p2p with automatic forwarding, no?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network
By requiring special hardware, and be it just some common router, or any sort of special technical skill, you are already excluding 99.99% of the world population...
This isn't about convenience and accessibility so much as resiliency in emergencies.
You can run LoRa from a small power bank for days, or run it off of a small battery and solar panel indefinitely. Wifi is much more power hungry. Wifi also doesn't offer kilometres of range, making that power cost largely wasteful.
In an emergency, if you have limited power, WiFi will exclude 100% of the population simply because it's not practical to operate at all. LoRa, even if it enables 0.01% of the population (primarily experts in the technology) in that emergency, is a greater benefit to everyone at that time.
WiFi is a peace time technology based around a rich infrastructure that is not resilient in emergencies. If you skimmed the article you should check it out again. She details this stuff, and it's actually really interesting and worth understanding if you're into this stuff:
LoRa radios have several advantages for use in emergency communications:
no centralized infrastructure needed
no license needed
cheap (starting at ~€20)
low-power (< 1W, can power with an ordinary mobile phone powerbank)
runs open source Meshtastic firmware
can send text messages across several line-of-sight hops (several kms)
can connect via Bluetooth or WiFi to phones/computers
many urban areas have a good Meshtastic network alreadyWiFi (with extra hardware, mostly antennas/routers, not too expensive anymore either) CAN offer (even tens of) kilometers of range, at least point to point: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lYJFwXw1ZIc
https://eu.store.ui.com/eu/en/category/wireless-ltu-5ghz/pro...
only 9W max power consumption too! well, that's not a few hundred milliwatts, still, better then ye olde lightbulb
PLUS gigabit throughput
if only our network stacks and protocols didn't assume hierarchical (local) networks by default, and kernels included p2p network stacks, then i'd feel more confident about blackouts being handled more gracefully
well, i suppose all this depends heavily on the nature of the emergency
generally i'm surprised that the sheer computational power of modern smartphones are not used more for this purpose, i haven't come across much true p2p software
on another note, there is still no (truly) cross-platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirDrop standard (especially one without artificial limitations), which is a shame
also i want to note that smartphones can even communicate directly with satellites now: https://youtube.com/watch?v=v30z-0bGbHQ
Yes, I use my phone over satellite regularly now. It's still amazing to me that it's possible. Phones are a great tool here because everyone truly does have them, they're portable, and they have large rechargeable batteries that can charge from countless sources over USB. So, it does seem like we could use them to great effect to create networks when other systems go down. I'm not sure they can handle long range comms due to requiring antennas, but close-range in cities might work well. I'm not sure what routing on that mesh would look like, or how busy it would get and how well phones could handle that.
Satellites could be an important component here, but there's always the need for redundancy. They can be compromised too, and you don't own them.
The LTU Extreme Range hardware is way, way more expensive than a LoRa radio, and it still uses quite a bit of power (relatively). It still seems far from ideal in situations where you can't depend on power utilities. Great point though, I wasn't aware that exists. It appears you need the one you linked as well as the Rocket as its base station, which puts it close to $800 CAD after taxes.
* I would consider adding a T-1000 device to the recommended list of devices, it's about the size of a credit card and works very well to add Meshtastic to phones. https://www.seeedstudio.com/SenseCAP-Card-Tracker-T1000-E-fo... It's a lot easier (in my opinion) to get people to stash a radio and remember how to power it to Bluetooth then to get setup from 0 on a new device. I think I paid about 40 euros each when I bought a pair.
* I have a Starlink mini--in the event that there is ever a broadly disconnecting event I'd be happy to share access to it. I keep it pretty much exclusively for emergency use and occasional camping/rural holiday house vacations. You might want to consider one too? They're ~250 euros new, which for someone who's starting a club for anything seems like a plausible expense. I believe there's a chinese version in case you don't want to trust the whims and emotions of Musk. * https://kiwix.org/en/applications/ is pretty useful if you'd like to have an archive of technical information, wikipedia, stack exchange etc.
* I try and keep whatever feels like the smartest open weight LLMs at the time available so if something real bad ever happened it'd still be available. I might add that idea to your preparedness list too--I'd probably take LM Studio with Gemma 3 over another random engineer on the Meshtastic channel :)
* Would you share channel config details for your IRC community? I'm happy to join.
Regarding the T1000-E:
> Note: Currently, LR1110 radios are unable to receive Meshtastic packets from the older SX127x radios, it requires a breaking change to fix this. Transmitting works and when hopping through an SX126x radio, you can still receive packets from SX127x radios.
https://meshtastic.org/docs/hardware/devices/seeed-studio/se...
Its range is also much worse than the T-Echo's.
I think that's totally fair if you're primarily working in rural/not dense communities. If you're in a major city, in practice it just doesn't matter and ease of use is king. In a disaster, everyone with a meshtastic radio has it on. Your messages will propagate just fine.
I thought so too, but apparently on starlink roam you can pause service (by the sounds of it, indefinitely), only restarting when you need it:
> You have the ability to pause and unpause service at any time, with billing occurring monthly.
Source: https://www.starlink.com/support/article/dd5b43b5-20e1-b29b-...
I think you still have access to whatever user-portal starlink uses, so you can unpause it that way. But I have not confirmed this, and could be mistaken. The documentation only mentions that when you are out of data you have access to that page, it doesn't mention anything about when your plan is paused.
> If you exceed the allotted data on the Roam 50GB plan and have not opted-in for additional data, you will be unable to use the internet except to access your Starlink account, from which you can add additional data or change plans.
Watch her 10-minute RIPE 90 talk and then listen to the first "question" for a short tutorial on how to behave like a prick: dude didn't even have a question, just wanted to let everyone know how much he knew about a somewhat related subject
that is one of my pet peeves: people who try to dominate discussions or make them about themselves (you might notice they say "I" a lot)
another way you might see it manifest: a simple question is asked, and without pausing to hear the answer, the questioner then goes on a long speech about their personal experiences and why they're asking the question and what the meaning of the question is etc etc, rephrasing the question several different times along the way
if you're actually interested in learning the answer to your question: *think* about the question first; compress it into 1 short sentence (5-10 seconds long) ending in a question mark; say it; and as soon as you hit the question mark, immediately be silent so the answerer can actually answer the question and get to other questioners
if you're worried they might not understand the question that way: do it anyways, and if they don't, wait for a chance to ask again (after others have had theirs)
1. Meshtastic / LoRa is just bad for communication, it has so many problems
2. In case of conflict, everyone who starts LoRa gets delivery of artillery shell/rocket on their position.
Just like in Ukraine, try to go there and start up stock firmware DJI drone there and see what happens :)
Same when using radios in UA, no.1 rule is to NOT use encrypted radios, I like this example the most, because it goes against common sense, why would you want to use unencrypted radios so enemies can see your whole communication.
Reason behind this is following, encrypted radio traffic is very interesting for enemy, so it means if someone using it, he must be someone important -> send shell, badabum.
If it is that easy to become an artillery target, you can use it to your advantage. Randomly place LoRa devices in area near the front (by autonomous or fiber optic drone drop to decrease risk). Switch and off by some random timer and see the enemy deplete its shells and drones.
"the market can remain irrational longer then you can remain solvent" applies in other circumstances too.
But the wider point is generally that just because something is less effective doesn't make it useless, and just because something is effective doesn't make it dominating.
If an enemy has an artillery advantage, then shelling obvious decoys is still taking decoys off the field, which you now need to replace. But worse, their existence is giving away the fact you're active in the area, and their placement is giving away your operational range - i.e. how far can a person move on foot over rough terrain? How far in a vehicle? etc. What's the effective range of their normal infantry weapons - if you know there's a decoy then the trap has a specific radius if it is a trap.
All on the bet that they will in fact run out of shells - or in the case of drones, they won't even run out since a drone can much more easily be re-targeted.
Well you entering deep level of game theory here. Can you distinguish the decoy from the real and what resources you need to spend (e.g. LoRa device in a home)? How much is the signal that you can deploy decoys worth? Isn't deploying decoys below some noise level of frontline drone activity and the enemy cannot learn nothing? How many shells do you need to destroy a decoy? How certain you are about the destruction?
Its been on HN before but its worth a repeat https://reticulum.network/ Its got more optimization for a low bandwidth LoRa without the brute force stuff of meshtastic
Also related though maybe not resiliency-focused: It's quite easy now to download all of Wikipedia and all of Project Gutenberg to a hard drive, so that whatever problems you have in the post-apocalyptic hellscape, boredom won't be one of them.
Kiwix is the best software I have found for this and they make an extensive library of materials available for download themselves, which includes the aforementioned but also many other resources that would be helpful in a disaster scenario: https://library.kiwix.org/
Many people already do that (e.g. I use Linux on a Laptop- I consider this bare-metal).
The way I read this, it's more about what is needed to get services back up after a large scale loss of critical infrastructure: communication to other network/internet/infrastructure professionals.
Or even just install local software. Get a computer that lasts (have at least one non laptop). Have maybe some maps and Wikipedia locally.
Maybe walkie talkies too? Pretty simple to use!
I spent the weekend moving all my personal projects away from github & AWS to to dedicated hardware in the EU, still not in my own home, but I'm toying with the idea of purchasing some hardware to run gitlab etc from my home network.
Renting dedicated hardware is expensive though. I'm taking a financial hit for my paranoia.
I host many services from a small rack in my home using FreeBSD jails.
The problem with these things is that people have no urgency to prepare, by pro-actively improving software and documentation, or even simply installing them. They need to be something people get value out of even before disaster hits, by improving performance or decreasing costs, for example.
I would use Reticulum instead of Meshtastic. https://reticulum.network
Pros: - it can actually scale past 20 devices - Forward secrecy encryption - Is designed to support multiple underlying transport systems such as TCP or LoRa - Announce based routing rather than flooding the entire network which is order of magnitudes faster Cons: - Not as many nodes as Meshtastic has - Python implementation with no C implementation (can be speed up with cython however)
Is it legal in the USA? I seem to recall that ham operators aren't allowed to encrypt their traffic, that's one reason I never got around to getting licensed. Maybe LoRs allows for it because it's unlicensed?
Ignore me, I answered my own question. Encryption is still illegal on HAM bands, but legal for things like LoRa that are unlicensed (hence WiFi).
Just dropping a HAMWAN link for anyone who is interested in higher power / longer range links. https://hamwan.org/
This sort of thing is interesting but I guess I've always found it really hard to invest my limited time and money into prepper-type stuff.
Are there use cases for this sort of thing that could make it worthwhile even if doomsday doesn't arrive?
One thing I’ve been very curious about along these lines is troposcatter systems. These, depending on the bandwidth, power, and antenna size available, should allow you to get tens to hundreds of megabits over up to hundreds of miles with moderate sized dishes. The military has some of these systems, but I haven’t seen too much ham activity with them.
but who has the gear, who keeps it charged, who actually shows up when the net goes dark. tech's the easy part. the hard part is getting 5 neighbors to agree on a channel, a meeting point, and a backup plan they’ll actually remember.
also, would be interesting to see people test these setups during a planned outage. like simulate a real failure for 24 hours and see what breaks. most systems look solid until you actually need them
I have a WAP on my shed roof and batteries that can power my gear for a few hours without the grid. In the absence of other WiFi networks the one atop my shed would stand out as a rallying point.
(It's not switched on / connected at the moment - I tested it out during COVID lockdowns, but no one else connected since we didn't have power outages).
That's why you can't rely on it.
If things go bad, you need to own the tech completely. Be able to setup a wifi hotspot with services that can help your community (wikipedia, openstreetmaps, low-res movies), or have pendrives with critical knowledge ready to be shared, etc.
The low power radio is more of a short term thing, for "what's going on" soon after the first moments of a crisis. Building long-term resilience is much harder.
IMHO, the loss of access to knowledge is much more detrimental than access to a network of people. One can eventually get you into the other, but there's only one you can actually own.
saveitforparts has multiple videos on meshstatic, if you want to see it in action, it is super interesting, but not without flaws apparently
I am into Meshtastic but the coverage, at least in Italy, is low and depends a lot on the position. If you are in a city, you can get many neighbors nodes, otherwise you need to be at high altitude, relying on other nodes or use a directional antenna.
Anyway, it's a nice hobby to learn a lot about solar powered systems and antennas/propagation.
I think that one of the best use cases for Meshtastic is to use it during protests, especially in authoritarian countries.
yeah it is kinda like starting your own internet infrastructure.
For protest there are already bluetooth messenger for that:
but yeah it is only for Android.
This module from SeedStudio is perfect for a small portable node. https://www.seeedstudio.com/Wio-SX1262-with-XIAO-ESP32S3-p-5...
There is also a version with Rak chip instead that ESP32, that is a lot less power hungry and it's perfect for a solar powered module.
>...all you hear is “Swan Lake” on repeat
Have I missed the meme on this one? What does this mean?
I've been thinking about an idea, that maybe it would be worthwhile for a city to create a wireless network where it uses rooftops for a mesh.
This WiFi offers a low-data-rate (<5-10 mbit/s) service to seniors for free or a very low fee (~3€/month), without service guarantees, but honest best-effort.
In the case when an internet problem arises, which affects the city's it-infrastructure, the city can switch to this WiFi to have their city-wide services still interconnected, while the seniors get kicked off of the network during this time.
Why not something like WinLink which works over short and long distances using Ham Radio? It even has an email gateway.
Then, there is JS8Call, PSK, SSB, FM, etc
On a local level, I feel like we can probably do better than just text messaging capabilities. Mesh network covering the village, with someone running mirrors of essential services in their basement (local email routing, wikipedia, etc)
just remember that even that won't last long. Electricity is an expensive resource and you won't get spare parts to keep the Wi-Fi running for long.
At most you will only be able to start a few Android-phone hotpspots and share files. That is the reality of it.
Maybe for professional communications. For cases where the grid is gone, you will quickly see how quickly you stop using electricity for luxuries such as that one.
At most you will be able to charge smartphones and small devices with solar panels. Keeping a larger Wi-Fi router running only on solar? Very seldom.
One thought -- more of a question -- and I'm not the first person to ask it -- How can we design a 'smaller' kind of internet? One that is less data hungry, less commercial, but still sustainable (how?), more of a community vibe, with distributed governance, less enshittification. Think of it like a maintainable garden. One that still works without a lot of extra effort, such as constant browser 'innovations' or bandwidth upgrades. Something more like a hardscaped garden instead of a typical American-style monoculture grass lawn requiring nonstop interventions to make it look pristine. This would have many benefits, including resilience, redundancy, and archival. Yes, I realize I'm conflating layers and maybe even asking too much. But sometimes it feels good to dream. At the very least, it is a genuine question I can use to evaluate various proposals and ideas in this general area.
The Gopher and (more recently) Gemini protocols are something like this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://geminiprotocol.net/
> Initially I looked into ham radio, but it is just too expensive, difficult, and power-hungry to be practical.
Beg to disagree here. 30 dollars for a cheap-ass Quansheng will get you pretty far as long as a repeater is in reach (if it's Echolink capable, worldwide), and a bunch of repeaters for all kinds of modes are tied together not only via the Internet but also via AMPR / HamNet [1]. APRS and DMR capable devices are in the 200 dollar range.
For high bandwidth data communication it becomes a bit more involved - Ubiquiti hardware for example can be trivially software-modified to transmit on the amateur radio ranges, which is how that gear ends up powering a lot of HamNet stations. Sadly, unless there's a HamNet node on a nearby large structure you'll probably need to raise a tower large enough to achieve line-of-sight to the nearest HamNet node.
For people in reach of the QO-100 satellite (i.e. Europe, Africa, about half of Asia), there have been experiments to use that satellite not just as a repeater for voice and video, but also data [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet
[2] https://forum.amsat-dl.org/index.php?thread/4306-npr-vsat-ip...
any people around Leuven, Belgium that want to start a club?
As someone who has done a fair bit of playing with Meshtastic in the last few months, it's worth really managing expectations... it is in no way a replacement for any sort of internet. It's a way of sending very short text messages, with a system that is really quite flaky in any kind of built-up urban environment. Don't get me wrong, it's great fun, but there's a reason stuff like Ham radio is robust.
GCP went down over a null pointer exception recently, taking down a good chunk of sites, and people claimed that it was the start of WW3, since obviously it would begin with an internet blackout - Meanwhile everyone is refreshing their feeds constantly to see the latest hypersonic missiles hit civilian houses in HD quality."war, geopolitics and climate change" seems like the same kind of paranoid hysteria. People just write buggy software
> "war, geopolitics and climate change" seems like the same kind of paranoid hysteria
It is until it isn't. Better not to write off these dangers and to just focus on keeping the general public in the dark to avoid mass hysteria, and treat these other threats with the required respect they deserve just in case.
At the beginning of COVID many countries had toilet paper shortages because of mass hysteria. Now imagine how ugly things would get if there wasn't enough food to go around. It's not that far fetched if there's a supply chain disruption. There's no secret food reserves at supermarkets, they sell products just-in-time.
If they do, they should also read commentary: https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/25227/what-...
If you look more, you'll most likely find more discussions. The things on StackExchange are a bit lame. There was a blog somewhere that posted about climate data for about a decade and had a discussion going on for maybe 2 months... I don't know if can find that again. Soon after the discussion of that paper the blog was pretty dead...
I remember bank run being one of the reasons why SVB failed, and also during the COVID pandemic people rushing to buy toilet paper has a terrible effect on the market.
However I don't think these cases are anywhere close to the level of widespread disruption that the list of dangers can bring.
Do you happen to know instances where mass hysteria had a similar effect on disrupting global supply chains or communication services than war, geopolitics etc?
I tried to parse it by reading the intro and the conclusion. Is it trying to say some of the heating effects will be potentially saturated and limited when co2 increases, decreasing temperature? York and Princeton seem legit but don't know about how well received this is
They're saying "The effects of the first ton of CO2 dumped into the atmosphere is much higher than the effects of the next ton. Now there's so much CO2 in the atmosphere that dumping any more into it will have a negligible effect."
The implication is "There's no need to worry about CO2 at this point, it's already done the damage it can, so let's call our global warming concerns off". But the models may be suspect (see my other post), so I wouldn't go celebrate just yet. Let's at least wait for peer review or submission to a notable journal to see how well received it is.
The essence is that each frequency alone is eventually saturated. (can't absorb more than everything). If you add more CO2 you'll start to absorb more in new frequencies, but the effect is getting smaller. To calculate how much the numbers add up, there is HITRAN-Database with a lot of data about the absorption lines.
About these calculations there's interesting material out there. I think there's even software to download, and feed with a download of HITRAN-Data.
Mass hysteria arguably belongs on the list of Bad Things, but I don't think it is as likely to knock out your internet or power supply for a prolonged period. Maybe more of a reason for a Toilet Roll Resiliency Club.
Mass Hysteria is seriously dangerous. A few years ago I've seen a full room of people applauding Military for ordering more tanks. ("Enough to have those shot down by Russia in the calculation"). And young German politicians being proud of it. They even said publicly "The best outcome of the Ukraine War would be reinstallment of the old German-Russian border."
Germany has the potential to go full Nazi again... And the population is mostly crazy in a scary way "We need sirens", "We need bunkers", "How can I make my pupils go for a career in the army"...
Instead of of investing time into making a mesh network. I'd like to see more energy spent on preventing real dangers. If people don't start going against the real troublemakers, loss of internet will be very low on the list of problems of the future.
And still nobody I've ever seen in public speak or comment about climate has ever read any paper on atmosphere physics... Before you build a mesh network against climate change, people should better read at least a few papers about atmosphere physics first.
No mention of starlink? Even if the internet is entirely down locally your packets could be routed to the other side of Earth before making it to the internet.
Starlink is much simpler for the average consumer to setup than what this article suggests.
The article is talking about the war in Ukraine specifically, and not only has the US repeatedly threatened to disable their starlink access if they don't agree to a treaty, Musk himself admitted to disabling starlink during a Ukrainian raid a couple of years back.
Resiliency isn't found by relying on corporations who are subject to interference by foreign nations.
Well IMHO it is more about if the infrastructure is centralized or decentralized. In a centralized infrastructure we are all at the whim of someone like Musk/Gates fill in the ______
A mesh network and federated services will not rely on one actor or server. And if you are in middle of no where and only a random guy from Texas is hosting, then maybe start your own node if he is unreliable.
Sure, as a backup to your regular internet it could work, and can be shared with your community. However, the objective is to be independent from any infrastructure. The US has boycotted the ICC in the Netherlands already, if the ICC were to arrest American or Israeli war criminals they may choose to expand that boycot to the whole country, which includes Starlink access.
nor during business as usual, which I think covers the total reliability of said person.
Being "modern" is a poor excuse. Code in C can be ported to anywhere, code in your "modern" language can only be understood by a few and is not portable anymore to other languages.
Please don't confuse security with resilience, they might be connected in some dots but have fundamentally different purposes.
Why? I mean... we had many "modern languages" that are not "modern" anymore, but the code in C still works, and when rust loses the "language of the week" status, the code in C will continue to be developed, and rust will be like go, ruby and others.
Sure, multiple languages do that and many more will.... will you rewrite all the software ever written to any new language that has something new? The current code works.
I've found Meshtastic is simply not ready to be set up in an environment without internet, as I discovered when I brought some of the boards I bought with me on vacation to a rural area with more space to test them, but very limited internet.
The entirety of the meshtastic project is web first.
- To flash your boards, the suggested method is their "Web Flasher", and if you download the firmware source, it depends on PlatformIO (and the internet) to download and install the toolchains and flasher programs you need.
- The clients for meshtastic are available on the app stores, or as a web app at https://client.meshtastic.org/ None of these are offline. I did later learn the boards themselves host the web app, but they still have to be connected to an Wifi AP, you don't get it just by plugging the board into your computer.
- The docs are hosted at https://meshtastic.org/docs. "Download Docs" or "How to self host this project" are not topics described there or anywhere else. A technical person could figure this out, but this is seemingly not a primary concern.
I suppose this is the very point of this post, to get people to have it all set up beforehand, but not even having the docs as a PDF I can read offline? I learned about Meshcore too in this thread, but if I go to their site and the "getting started" guide is a Youtube video, then you're not ready for an emergency!