I’ve been tangentially involved in experimenting with Meshtastic and trying to scale it for large events like Burning Man, on the order of 2000–3000 nodes on a single frequency.
Node to node mesh communication is cool and it works surprisingly well at small scale, but the moment we brought high powered repeaters online the difference was night and day. Coverage, reliability, and usability all jumped instantly.
It makes the tradeoff really obvious. Mesh is great for bootstrapping and local traffic, but once you care about real data propagation at scale, centralized infrastructure wins almost every time. Airtime is scarce, coordination matters, and having a small number of well placed high sites beats thousands of mediocre relays.
I still think there’s room for novelty P2P protocols, but mostly as an optimization layer on top of infrastructure, not as the foundation. Every time you push on this problem hard enough, you end up rediscovering the client router model for a reason.
Of course there's no reason to use a mesh when infrastructure is available. That's not why a mesh would be useful. But it doesn't even need to be a mesh to be a useful feature. Walkie talkies aren't a mesh and they remain useful.
On the other hand a "high powered repeater" for Meshtastic is just the same board with a bigger more optimised antenna.
You can get solar powered ones for under 100€ and slap them wherever you want pretty easily. (But please don't unless you know what you're doing, adding useless router nodes makes the network worse, not better)
Node to node mesh communication is cool and it works surprisingly well at small scale, but the moment we brought high powered repeaters online the difference was night and day. Coverage, reliability, and usability all jumped instantly.
It makes the tradeoff really obvious. Mesh is great for bootstrapping and local traffic, but once you care about real data propagation at scale, centralized infrastructure wins almost every time. Airtime is scarce, coordination matters, and having a small number of well placed high sites beats thousands of mediocre relays.
I still think there’s room for novelty P2P protocols, but mostly as an optimization layer on top of infrastructure, not as the foundation. Every time you push on this problem hard enough, you end up rediscovering the client router model for a reason.