Comment by perarneng
1 day ago
In russia they have limited internet now. something like mestastic is something everyone would need to make sure we could have communication even though someone tried to limit it.
1 day ago
In russia they have limited internet now. something like mestastic is something everyone would need to make sure we could have communication even though someone tried to limit it.
I'm on a fence about this.
First, the biggest issue r/n is the concern that external internet will be limited to a point of no return, for this meshtastic is quite useless because to go across the border you need powerful transmitters and risk of placing and maintaining them near the border. In russia this is not only risk of going to prison but also being literally shot if border patrol/FSB overreacts. Even if you're successful bandwidth is miniscule compared to what a modern country needs to communicate internationally.
Second, due to Ukraine piggybacking on cellular networks for drone targeting/control cell service is frequently disrupted by authorities in the areas of a likely attack (it's obviously as effective as this sounds compounded by general incompetence of the government). While they cannot shut it down completely because russia still doesn't want to go back to the stone age, this concern is largely non-existent for meshtastic though. If it becomes widely popular and coverage expands, it also could be used by Ukraine as a control network, and in this case I would expect russian authorities to just jam the whole frequency range and be done with it. So the moment it becomes viable alternative is the moment it will be shut down.
Is russia densely populated enough to be able to make it work? Around me I'm having trouble getting a connection to any other nodes because there isn't a critical mass of other people running mesh nodes and there's a hill between me and the next city
I have 3 permanent gateways within 3 miles of my house (the closest is <1 mile away) and yet unless I hang my own gateway in the attic, I won't even hear anyone, even from the bedroom window that's at the direction of the closest gw.
That means my awful, underpowered and suboptimally placed gw tries to take part in the network - I can't even make it repeat late (prefer other repeaters), so it jusg mostly adds to the noise (and increases power use).
That's with Meshtastic
With Meshcore? I was unable to hear even one transmission, and I love in the densely populated region.
This doesn't really work, maybe as an impromptu off the grid chat platform for a forest walk, provided no one strays too far. Even 0.5W transceivers work better.
https://meshmap.net
https://www.meshcoretel.ru/en/MOW/map
Maybe other maps too...
I thing Russia's main problem (not only with mesh) is that you have millions of people living in or near few cities and very few inbetween.
And those living "inbetween" typically have no money or time for things like mesh, they are struggling with simplier things.
> And those living "inbetween" typically have no money or time for things like mesh, they are struggling with simplier things.
It's just a personal opinion, but I really think this is not the case in reality.
Those guys in the middle of nowhere are the biggest geeks in LoRa networks. They have more practical scenarios, more to gain and better conditions for great distances.
A friend of mine lives far away from me, barely populated area, a big city in between of us. He struggled to get any network traffic, but now he uses narrow antennas to point to particular repeaters and suddenly the whole metropolis is open to him. We talk with acceptable delivery rates (I'm guessing 70%, which is actually very decent in dense area like mine). He is currently trying to expand his local network. His neighbors are less technical, but they have frequent power failures and need alternative way to reach each other.
On the other hand there is A LOT of client nodes and repeaters in my city. Many struggle to reach even a single repeater - hard to access roofs, high buildings, crowded network with plenty of conflicts. This kills motivation for many.
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Put one of these onto the hill and you might have more luck: https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005011893329415.html
You could also use their site planner to plan out optimal placement: https://site.meshtastic.org/
I don't own the hill and there are people living on it, and I don't particularly want to hang up nodes on council property or worse, private property
In that case I think Reticulum would be the better use case as it's encrypted from the start.
https://reticulum.network/manual/whatis.html
Reticulum is an open-source, cryptography-based networking stack designed to build secure, resilient, and decentralized low-bandwidth wide-area networks using readily available hardware. It operates efficiently over various mediums like LoRa, WiFi, Ethernet, and serial connections, enabling autonomous communication that cannot be easily censored, surveilled, or controlled
There are lot of Meshtastic nodes over Moscow and some larger cities.
Since wired internal connection inside Russia is not limited, so _for now_ there is no need in dense LoRa meshes - Meshtastic mqtt transport will work just fine.
Are you trying about cross-border communication in event where the internet is somehow blocked near the border?