No internet required… In this video, I build a public Reticulum node and test whether it can bridge completely different networks into one encrypted communication path. I send messages from a normal phone over LTE, through the internet and Starlink, then off-grid over LoRa—eventually using a $20 drone-mounted relay to reach a phone with no internet connection at all.
Reticulum is a great project, but it’s not a replacement for the internet. LoRA (a potential piece in that chain) has very low data throughput; it’s fine for messages, but you’re not delivering web pages or streaming media with it.
Unless and until the throughput can be increased, Meshtastic/Meshcore is really only a replacement for text messaging, which might be perfectly fine for setting up encrypted comms or rapidly deploying communications in an emergency scenario.
Both are terrible for that. I hope that it’s a small number of people that get killed relying on LoRa for emergency communications that result in the project(s) being sued out of existence.
Hey guys, I’ve got a great idea: Let’s buy some $15 Arduino-like devices with milliwatts of transmitter power and trust them to life and limb! Even stupider than the people who buy Baofeng radios to put in a “bug out bag” and never use. Those at least mostly work.
I believe this stuff is going to be huge. Reticulum, Lora, Meshtastic all bit players now in a drama that has yet to get a finished script. It will start out as a supplement to the Internet, allowing you connectivity even when your Internet falters and as it becomes more ubiquitous, it will be increasingly used/usable and increasingly important. It can’t be shut down, it can’t be controlled. A country would literally have to ban radio signals of any kind in order to shut it down. It’s free. Buy the hardware, use the network, because you are the network. I love this.
LoRa is very low bandwidth, only suitable for short text messages. Radio frequencies are heavily regulated, easy to triangulate, and can be shutdown. People could build a higher speed, planned WiFi mesh; hops just have to be closer. Neighborhoods could build cat6 and fiber into meshes if they wanted to as well.
“Internet killer”
I send messages from a normal phone over LTE, through the internet… to reach a phone with no internet connection at all
Sure. But the point is with Reticulum you dont NEED to leverage existing internet infrastructure. This guy chose to for his demo, but you could easily do the same thing over RS485, or a serial port, or ametuer radio bands. The protocol is medium agnostic.
No, its no internet killer. But its useful right now and pretty fun to mess around with.
I think it’s illegal to use Reticulum over amatuer radio because it’s encrypted?
Biggest bullshit ever written in the history of mankind.
Huh. I actually didn’t know that this supports up to 1gbps. I thought it was just low bandwidth.
It is as soon as you use LoRa. Reticulum is just an overlay
Except the LTE, Internet and Starlink would be your ISP. It’s whatever facilitates an IP(v6) address to connect to the web.
That is what he used, but it is possible to go from Reticulum to Reticulum device without the need for those services, he just happened to use them in the video example. In this hypothetical future, those services won’t be completely cut out anytime soon, but it is possible to rely on them much lesser.
This title is so bad it gave me cancer
