> RNodes can be made in many different configurations, and can use many different radio bands, but they will generally operate in the 433 MHz, 868 MHz, 915 MHZ and 2.4 GHz bands. They will usually offer configurable on-air data speeds between just a few hundred bits per second, up to a couple of megabits per second.
> [...]
> While speeds are lower than WiFi, typical communication ranges are many times higher. Several kilometers can be acheived with usable bitrates, even in urban areas, and over 100 kilometers can be achieved in line-of-sight conditions.
( https://unsigned.io/rnode/ )
> Reticulum is the cryptography-based networking stack for building local and wide-area networks with readily available hardware. Reticulum can continue to operate even in adverse conditions with very high latency and extremely low bandwidth.
There are huge regulatory moats around everything that costs $20-500/mo recurring and is incurred by large percentages of the population. Internet access is a huge one.
However, this will also expose issues with encapsulation of "the connection", which can now vary exponentially in capacity. Operating systems and applications are coded to be 'carrier frequency agnostic', without any capability for a given connection to switch from "low data mode" (avoid unnecessary transmissions) to "high data mode" (do whatever you like), much less to "extremely low data mode" (i.e. push notifications and foreground app only) or to "extremely high data mode" (i.e. 4k / 240fps over 60GHz); all on a single dynamically-adjusting connection.
Cellular fakes this today by saying "5G high data permitted?" but not being able to downgrade OS and app behaviors gracefully when the 5G connection is hella weak or overloaded, i.e. not fetching mail or not autoplaying movies or etc.
You have to be close to a router the first time to connect to it.
And after that you both have some long (ie. 65536 bit) random key which is used as a modulation code for your transmissions.
The receiver demodulates with the key to get the data out. Different key can get different data out of the same airwaves at the same time.
Clock's need to be synced perfectly, which is in itself a big technical challenge.
As the article slides to, low power signal reception is also challenging.
> a setup which can give 100 Mbit at 100 yards should be able to do 322 kbits at 1 mile, and 3kbps at 10 miles!
That's not how noise floor works
Current stuff like LoRa works because there's not many users and the protocols are optimized, but if everyone was iMessaging we'd probably need more spectrum.
We can already do WiFi for miles with narrow beam antennas, we could make mesh network tech cheap if it was standardized and mass produced.
This could be used to implement bridges between LANs located at great distances one from the other. There were commercial products implementing such LAN bridges through WiFi.
When an access point must transmit and receive omni-directionally, to reach any station placed randomly around it, that diminishes a lot the achievable range.
Physics lets me do that with no additional transmit power (shannon's channel capacity formula, combined with signal power dropping off as a function of distance squared).
If suitable modulation was chosen (ie. some kind of CDMA), then a setup which can give 100 Mbit at 100 yards should be able to do 322 kbits at 1 mile, and 3kbps at 10 miles!