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I've been exploring the LoRa space (and more generally the 900MHz unlicensed ISM band in North America) for a couple years now. I think there's a really intere

I've been exploring the LoRa space (and more generally the 900MHz unlicensed ISM band in North America) for a couple years now. I think there's a really interesting direction here for switching away from corporate internet. I don't see any reason why we can't build an ad-hoc, citizen operated telecommunications infrastructure in the form of cheap mesh networks and distributed storage. I would love to see a local-first/backbone-last paradigm for internet usage. Screw all this walled garden app and corporate media pipeline. I just want to socialize and meet new people in the digital realm. Having said that, I've been working on a hardware project I've been calling Walkie Texties. Basically a prototype of what a geolocal-first non-internet network might look like, sitting on top of 915MHz using LoRa. I'm still learning hardware stuff and circuitpython has been a real godsend. Got a couple of these bad boys and plan to attach a LoRa capable Feather to the back. https://www.adafruit.com/product/4818 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4818 This is basically a ready-made geolocal-first chatroom platform. A Walkie Textie, you might say. The range of LoRa is 1-2 miles in dense city and _over 200 miles_ line of sight with a pretty minimal antenna. That's pretty cool...

noman-land 6y ago
There was a similar device I tried to buy last year but they went out of stock before I found them. https://www.tindie.com/products/greycatco/lora-text-development-kit-text-over-915mhz/ https://www.tindie.com/products/greycatco/lora-text-developm...
generalizations 6y ago
The key for wide spread adoption would be enabling more than point to point communication, and figuring out how to make the hardware really easy to make or obtain. Are there any known algorithms that can scale mesh nets to high throughput? And, how are we encouraged to run intermediary nodes? I'd set myself up with this in a heartbeat, if it let me communicate with people 300-600 miles away and was easy to set up. Also, is encryption allowed?
giantrobot 6y ago
The biggest issue you run into with ISM band mesh networks is they are competing with the rest of the world's WiFi networks. In the 2.4GHz band there's three non-overlapping channels available. If you've got three overlapping networks in some area and they're all using a different overlapping channel you're fine. As soon as the density increases beyond that best case you have channel overlap and interference between the networks. The more users on any individual network the more interference and less usable bandwidth for each node. Enterprise type deployments use tons and tons of micro cells. Each WAP has a low power output so they each end up with a small coverage area and are wired up for backhaul into the core network. Solving mesh routing is pretty straightforward but the physics of the PHY layer are much more difficult. A mesh network in a suburban or rural area ends up more practical than an urban one. Moving to 5GHz for a mesh can help but the range and penetration is much worse. Every node in the mesh would need aerial directional antennas to effectively link to one another. That ends up making everything more expensive or against HOA rules or whatever. Even if you've got all the physical issues handled you've still got bandwidth issues. More than a handful of clients on a node will start to contest for bandwidth. If any connection between sets of nodes bottlenecks through a single node (which happens all the time due to geography) a whole segment of the mesh can have their bandwidth reduced. Meshes are cool and there's lots of capability available at small scales but they tend to fall down quickly at larger scales because they're trying to squeeze into relatively narrow unlicensed radio bands.
- noman-land 6y ago
  Thanks for all the insights. There's definitely a lot of issues to overcome. Nice to get some perspectives. I think there's a decent space here for a sub internet that's totally open to the public. Like a bootstrap internet. Right now in order to use The Internet you have to pay someone for access and use privately owned infrastructure. There's room for a layer below, on the community level. I imagine being able to buy or build a $5-$10 commodity item, press the ON switch, and be connected to a level of internet that's lesser but still extremely useful, and can exist off the main internet if needed but doesn't have to. Not to mention uses in the event of emergencies.
adrianpike 6y ago
You should take a peek at the community over at https://www.meshtastic.org/ https://www.meshtastic.org/. I've been building some tangential stuff using LoRa as the PHY, and it's pretty good so far. Bandwidth isn't huge but range is great.

noman-land 6y ago

There was a similar device I tried to buy last year but they went out of stock before I found them. https://www.tindie.com/products/greycatco/lora-text-development-kit-text-over-915mhz/ https://www.tindie.com/products/greycatco/lora-text-developm...

generalizations 6y ago

The key for wide spread adoption would be enabling more than point to point communication, and figuring out how to make the hardware really easy to make or obtain. Are there any known algorithms that can scale mesh nets to high throughput? And, how are we encouraged to run intermediary nodes? I'd set myself up with this in a heartbeat, if it let me communicate with people 300-600 miles away and was easy to set up. Also, is encryption allowed?

giantrobot 6y ago

The biggest issue you run into with ISM band mesh networks is they are competing with the rest of the world's WiFi networks. In the 2.4GHz band there's three non-overlapping channels available. If you've got three overlapping networks in some area and they're all using a different overlapping channel you're fine. As soon as the density increases beyond that best case you have channel overlap and interference between the networks. The more users on any individual network the more interference and less usable bandwidth for each node. Enterprise type deployments use tons and tons of micro cells. Each WAP has a low power output so they each end up with a small coverage area and are wired up for backhaul into the core network. Solving mesh routing is pretty straightforward but the physics of the PHY layer are much more difficult. A mesh network in a suburban or rural area ends up more practical than an urban one. Moving to 5GHz for a mesh can help but the range and penetration is much worse. Every node in the mesh would need aerial directional antennas to effectively link to one another. That ends up making everything more expensive or against HOA rules or whatever. Even if you've got all the physical issues handled you've still got bandwidth issues. More than a handful of clients on a node will start to contest for bandwidth. If any connection between sets of nodes bottlenecks through a single node (which happens all the time due to geography) a whole segment of the mesh can have their bandwidth reduced. Meshes are cool and there's lots of capability available at small scales but they tend to fall down quickly at larger scales because they're trying to squeeze into relatively narrow unlicensed radio bands.

noman-land 6y ago
Thanks for all the insights. There's definitely a lot of issues to overcome. Nice to get some perspectives. I think there's a decent space here for a sub internet that's totally open to the public. Like a bootstrap internet. Right now in order to use The Internet you have to pay someone for access and use privately owned infrastructure. There's room for a layer below, on the community level. I imagine being able to buy or build a $5-$10 commodity item, press the ON switch, and be connected to a level of internet that's lesser but still extremely useful, and can exist off the main internet if needed but doesn't have to. Not to mention uses in the event of emergencies.

adrianpike 6y ago

You should take a peek at the community over at https://www.meshtastic.org/ https://www.meshtastic.org/. I've been building some tangential stuff using LoRa as the PHY, and it's pretty good so far. Bandwidth isn't huge but range is great.