Why LoRa Mesh Enthusiasts Are Outgrowing Meshtastic and MeshCore

An ISP operator with his own ASN argues that even direct BGP peering doesn’t escape dependence on a handful of central providers, and that mesh networking over LoRa radio offers a practical hedge. LoRa’s sub-gigahertz, license-free bands trade bandwidth for range and low power, making it unsuitable for streaming or gaming but well-matched to messaging, social posts, and resilient information sharing in censored or underserved regions.

Meshtastic dominates the consumer LoRa space thanks to first-mover advantage and a polished out-of-box experience, but its flood-based propagation falls apart on large public meshes. MeshCore replaces flooding with actual routing and supports up to 64 hops, dramatically reducing radio congestion, but it splits the network into companion devices and dedicated repeaters rather than a true peer mesh — and its official clients are proprietary, with paywalled features, which the author considers disqualifying for software meant to function off-grid.

The piece frames this as a window before network effects entrench either platform, urging enthusiasts to hold out for a genuinely open, fully peer-routed alternative (the post’s title flags Reticulum as a candidate, though it isn’t covered in the excerpt). The underlying argument is political as much as technical: local devices are powerful enough to carry critical communications without renting access from ISPs or satellite operators.