Comment by maxgashkov

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.