Having looked at things like this before (including Meshtastic) the thing that stuck out to me about Reticulum is that it’s carrier-agnostic. LoRa is cool, but being able to extend the network over arbitrary channels sounds very appealing.
Reticulum also needs a general-purpose computer -- RPi, laptop, etc. -- that can run the Python daemon that actually handles network traffic.
Meshtastic doesn't use or provide a TCP/IP stack (aside from a limited TUN interface wrapper which is really more of a proof-of-concept) but any device that can connect to a node using WiFi, BLE, or USB serial can use the network.
Yeah, that does seem to be the main downside from what I can tell. Although Meshtastic devices seem to generally require a companion device to use most of their functionality, so I wonder how much that matters at this stage.
I definitely would like a small stand-alone communicator type device at some point though, and yes, that’s probably more feasible with Meshtastic at this point. (Though there are Feather boards that can run Linux too which I’ve thought about playing around with.)
But doesn't carrier agnostic in this context mean that it is very hard to coordinate with people to have compatible hardware?
A nice compatible routing protocol does not help when people have a mix of LoRa, commodity 2.4GHz and 5GHz wifi as the physical layer.
And then add in more esoteric stuff like 3.6GHz CBRS, 433MHz NPR-70, 900MHz Ubiquiti radios or new 802.11ah sub-1GHz radios.
Maybe, but if you want to connect networks between two nearby towns for example, it’d be nice to be able to run that off commodity hardware that’s a bit higher-bandwidth than what you’ll get on LoRa.
And realistically I suspect that people using it for the same sort of use cases they’d use Meshtastic for will be using the same LILYGO (and similar) hardware.
