The "100x bandwidth" claim needs to be substantiated.
There are some significant regulatory issues with the current popular mesh network protocols in the USA, namely that neither MeshCore or Meshtastic are compliant with the actual FCC regulations. 100x bandwidth because you're breaking the rules isn't the same as 100x bandwidth legally.
The issue you linked to is about MeshCore using channels that are too narrow. A mesh system claiming to offer 100x bandwidth is probably not violating regulations in that particular way.
It sucks how everything feels like a toy. I think meshtastic is the closest thing to a “product”. They made a bunch of bad architectural decisions that are haunting them now like how nodes broadcast its info.
It doesn't surprise me. This is a deep networking problem and very few CS people know anything about networking or how to design clean, fast, low-overhead network protocols and systems.
If IP were designed today the packets would have 500+ bytes of plain text JSON as headers and the spec would support hundreds of extensions.
Correct me if I am wrong but I thought the primary appeal of LoRa was range? Also isn't the primary factor in making long range radio go through things is the frequency? So 2.4ghz is the same frequency as consumer wifi right and thus would propagate about the same right?
It doesn't seem like this would be that useful except that the protocol is LoRa so you can have higher bandwidth between two devices if they happen to be close enough together.
LoRa would go much farther than Wifi on 2.4ghz. Lora uses Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) modulation while wifi uses OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing). The first being designed for extreme range while the latter for bandwidth. At 2.4ghz you could probably get LoRa connections up to 6 miles with the right antenna height.
6 miles seems a very optimistic estimation: 2.4Ghz propagation is very reduced by obstacles like buildings or trees and at that frequency the atmospheric water (fog, rain, humidity) have a big impact on propagation. And you need also to consider that 2.4Ghz is a very polluted band, then the noise floor is significatevly higher than in the 865/915 Mhz.
Moreover at 2.4Ghz the Fresnel window is smaller and the risk of multipath fading is higher.
"Going through things" isn't always necessary / is avoidable in some deployments. And 2.4GHz signals can propagate an okay distance between nodes if there aren't things to go through. (Globalstar's emergency SOS satellite constellation uses the n53 band, which is right above the 2.4GHz "wi-fi" band, and it propagates between handsets and LEO through 1400km of air just fine.)
So you could probably pull off a 2.4GHz mesh outdoors in rural areas? It'd be feasible in the same places a microwave-laser hilltop-to-hilltop link would, but instead of "fast but point-to-point" it's "slow but meshed" (and with much larger tolerance for slop — you don't need to put everything on fixed masts so they have perfect line-of-sight, you can just stick them on the tops of trees or whatever and if they wave in the wind it still works.)
Mind you, the authors' motivating use-case for the hardware seems to be their project (https://github.com/datapartyjs/MeshTNC) to (AFAICT) bridge LoRa (or some specific LoRa L2 protocol — Meshtastic, probably?) to packet radio, i.e. digital packet-switched signalling over amateur (HAM) radio bands.
In that context, the tradeoff of high throughput for low propagation makes sense. Insofar as you're working with LoRa, and want to build and experiment with a bunch of site-local devices that mesh between themselves and interoperate with LoRa data-link protocols, you'd likely be speaking something like LoRA over 2.4GHz (LoRa itself doesn't spec a way to do that, but you could make it happen within the closed ecosystem of your own home/office.)
And in that context, you could use a MeshTNC device as something like "LoRaLAN" router. It'd be something you'd keep somewhere central in your house (like a wi-fi router), plugged into power + an antenna (internal to your house, like a wi-fi router) and plugged into a packet-radio transceiver with its own even-bigger antenna, outside your house. (Like a wi-fi router being plugged into a gateway modem on its upstream WAN port.)
This MeshTNC device would then pick up signals from:
- regular LoRaWAN IoT devices and Meshtastic handsets in your building
- more custom devices in your building†, that you've built yourself, that use another MeshTNC module; where these other devices do their part of the meshing only on the 2.4GHz band, which means they don't need big fiddly external antennas like LoRa devices do, but can be quite compact
- and possibly, a separate bidirectional LoRa repeater (made from any existing "high-gain" LoRa module, i.e. the kind used in mains-powered LoRaWAN base stations) — which brings in LoRa mesh traffic from outside your building, and picks up and carries away "destined for elsewhere in this area" LoRa mesh traffic that your "LoRaLAN" device has emitted (either due to forwarding it from your 2.4GHz-only mesh handsets/devices, or due to forwarding it after receiving it from packet radio.)
Though keep in mind you only need that complexity for the 2.4GHz-only mesh devices, since there isn't an existing mesh to forward those packets. But this whole setup is still also a regular LoRa mesh, and so you can still use regular LoRa (e.g. meshtastic) handsets, and put out packets that make their way through your regional mesh, back to the packet-radio bridge in your building; and from there to who-knows-where.
† To be clear, the 2.4GHz mesh handsets would only work reliably inside your building (if the 2.4GHz antenna is inside your building); but knowing HAMs, half the point would be seeing how far away you could get from your house/office and have your 2.4GHz mesh handsets keep working. (You'd probably want to have a second MeshTNC "base station" with a building-external antenna to try that. Pleasantly, that doesn't complicate the topology; it's all still just mesh, so you can just drop that in.)
Seems like this would support institutional/campus environments or changing environments where the sensors at the edge are sending higher bandwidth ultimately back to an Internet node using LoRA mesh--instead of directional WiFi?
I'm trying to envision the application of a mesh like this. These could be examples?
- interconnected nodes need to share data (like images)
- interconnected nodes are acting as a collective array of sensors (eg. geolocation)
- interconnected mesh nodes provide redundant pathways back to the central node
- interconnected mesh nodes provide spatial diversity in case of interference or jamming
- nodes are mobile (eg. drone or vehicle) and mesh provides alternative connectivity based on node location and RF attenuation (also provides longer range with mesh connectivity)
Gonna reply here, but this isn't about you or this post:
HN has a lot of us that have ~0 idea what you'd use this for, even when we steelman, all we can do is vaguely handwave about easier to setup wireless internet on a vast compound we own.
Would be really cool if someone could hop in and just give a couple one off examples, i guess? Only other one handwave I can think of is IOT x assembly line stuff for businesses, but I'm real curious why individuals are so into it -- or maybe they're not, and that's why the codebase quality is so poor? Idk.
Assuming you mean mesh in general:
Meshtastic like projects
- emergency communication
- low power data transfer for sensors
- low data rate data transfer for mobile groups. Air softers use it to transmit information to each other while playing.
HaLow:
- "high" data rate over shorter range, though much higher range than 2.4 wifi
- data sharing between mobile groups like above, but high enough bandwidth for low quality video
I know it’s all open source and I’m not paying for anything so I cant be choosy. But after playing with a bunch of Lora peer to peer chat systems. All I wish is a chat service that uses haloW. Since it uses wifi backend, regular wifi should work as well.
Not much. While this is technically LoRa on 2.4GHz (which is not new), most people will associate LoRa with significantly longer range and LoRa 2.4 can do.
Cue xkcd on standards. I've been interested in mesh radio, and I keep hoping that a winner will emerge. Probably won't until a large commercial vendor gets interested and picks one.
Metricom Ricochet used dual-band radios, operating in 900MHz and 2.4GHz, to form a routable mesh that delivered internet access and other services, in 1999.
They used repeaters on street lights as part of the infrastructure, and even after the company went belly up people were able to use the repeaters for private networks. Pretty slick for the mid 90s.
There are some significant regulatory issues with the current popular mesh network protocols in the USA, namely that neither MeshCore or Meshtastic are compliant with the actual FCC regulations. 100x bandwidth because you're breaking the rules isn't the same as 100x bandwidth legally.
Here is the issue discussing this in the MeshCore repository: https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/issues/945
If IP were designed today the packets would have 500+ bytes of plain text JSON as headers and the spec would support hundreds of extensions.
It doesn't seem like this would be that useful except that the protocol is LoRa so you can have higher bandwidth between two devices if they happen to be close enough together.
So you could probably pull off a 2.4GHz mesh outdoors in rural areas? It'd be feasible in the same places a microwave-laser hilltop-to-hilltop link would, but instead of "fast but point-to-point" it's "slow but meshed" (and with much larger tolerance for slop — you don't need to put everything on fixed masts so they have perfect line-of-sight, you can just stick them on the tops of trees or whatever and if they wave in the wind it still works.)
Mind you, the authors' motivating use-case for the hardware seems to be their project (https://github.com/datapartyjs/MeshTNC) to (AFAICT) bridge LoRa (or some specific LoRa L2 protocol — Meshtastic, probably?) to packet radio, i.e. digital packet-switched signalling over amateur (HAM) radio bands.
In that context, the tradeoff of high throughput for low propagation makes sense. Insofar as you're working with LoRa, and want to build and experiment with a bunch of site-local devices that mesh between themselves and interoperate with LoRa data-link protocols, you'd likely be speaking something like LoRA over 2.4GHz (LoRa itself doesn't spec a way to do that, but you could make it happen within the closed ecosystem of your own home/office.)
And in that context, you could use a MeshTNC device as something like "LoRaLAN" router. It'd be something you'd keep somewhere central in your house (like a wi-fi router), plugged into power + an antenna (internal to your house, like a wi-fi router) and plugged into a packet-radio transceiver with its own even-bigger antenna, outside your house. (Like a wi-fi router being plugged into a gateway modem on its upstream WAN port.)
This MeshTNC device would then pick up signals from:
- regular LoRaWAN IoT devices and Meshtastic handsets in your building
- more custom devices in your building†, that you've built yourself, that use another MeshTNC module; where these other devices do their part of the meshing only on the 2.4GHz band, which means they don't need big fiddly external antennas like LoRa devices do, but can be quite compact
- and possibly, a separate bidirectional LoRa repeater (made from any existing "high-gain" LoRa module, i.e. the kind used in mains-powered LoRaWAN base stations) — which brings in LoRa mesh traffic from outside your building, and picks up and carries away "destined for elsewhere in this area" LoRa mesh traffic that your "LoRaLAN" device has emitted (either due to forwarding it from your 2.4GHz-only mesh handsets/devices, or due to forwarding it after receiving it from packet radio.)
Though keep in mind you only need that complexity for the 2.4GHz-only mesh devices, since there isn't an existing mesh to forward those packets. But this whole setup is still also a regular LoRa mesh, and so you can still use regular LoRa (e.g. meshtastic) handsets, and put out packets that make their way through your regional mesh, back to the packet-radio bridge in your building; and from there to who-knows-where.
† To be clear, the 2.4GHz mesh handsets would only work reliably inside your building (if the 2.4GHz antenna is inside your building); but knowing HAMs, half the point would be seeing how far away you could get from your house/office and have your 2.4GHz mesh handsets keep working. (You'd probably want to have a second MeshTNC "base station" with a building-external antenna to try that. Pleasantly, that doesn't complicate the topology; it's all still just mesh, so you can just drop that in.)
I'm trying to envision the application of a mesh like this. These could be examples?
- interconnected nodes need to share data (like images)
- interconnected nodes are acting as a collective array of sensors (eg. geolocation)
- interconnected mesh nodes provide redundant pathways back to the central node
- interconnected mesh nodes provide spatial diversity in case of interference or jamming
- nodes are mobile (eg. drone or vehicle) and mesh provides alternative connectivity based on node location and RF attenuation (also provides longer range with mesh connectivity)
HN has a lot of us that have ~0 idea what you'd use this for, even when we steelman, all we can do is vaguely handwave about easier to setup wireless internet on a vast compound we own.
Would be really cool if someone could hop in and just give a couple one off examples, i guess? Only other one handwave I can think of is IOT x assembly line stuff for businesses, but I'm real curious why individuals are so into it -- or maybe they're not, and that's why the codebase quality is so poor? Idk.
- emergency communication
- low power data transfer for sensors
- low data rate data transfer for mobile groups. Air softers use it to transmit information to each other while playing.
HaLow:
- "high" data rate over shorter range, though much higher range than 2.4 wifi - data sharing between mobile groups like above, but high enough bandwidth for low quality video
- large area wifi deployments
Say I start the node and then what?