Home/Transports
Many roads, one message
One message, every road
A message doesn’t care how it travels. Every link your phone can make is a way for messages to move, with identical privacy guarantees on all of them.
LoRa — the long one
Kilometers, through terrain, on a battery
This is what makes the network exist in places with no infrastructure at all. Where nothing else reaches, LoRa does — slowly, cheaply, and for days on a single charge. MeshDTN inherits MeshCore’s proven radio layer and board support.
MeshDTN deliberately does not diverge from MeshCore’s radio parameters — same modulation, same channel presets, same power. Inherited on purpose: a preset nobody else runs means no community range data transfers, no third-party tooling matches, and no comparable field results.
No intentional difference
Not even the sync word. MeshDTN uses stock MeshCore’s, so a flashed radio stays in the MeshCore network it was in, and MeshCore users can text it the ordinary way.
Carried traffic still moves only between MeshDTN nodes: it is sent with no path, and a stock radio that hears it drops it rather than relaying it.
WiFi & LAN — the fast one
A coffee shop is an enormous mixing point
Two phones on the same network exchange everything they’re holding in about a second. An office, a shelter, a staging area, a coffee shop — and it costs no airtime and almost no battery.
Discovery uses a rotating service name that derives from nothing stable. Your phone doesn’t announce a persistent identifier to every device on the network and every router log along the way.
Why it matters so much
A slow link moves a handful of messages per encounter. A fast one drains a whole store into a whole store. One shelter with WiFi does more mixing in an afternoon than a hilltop repeater does in a week — and none of it spends airtime that a LoRa link needs.
Bluetooth LE — the dense one
Phone to phone, with no radio at all
Two phones in Bluetooth range exchange messages directly, with no radio attached, each one a carrier for the other. No network to join and nothing to pair — two people standing near each other is the whole requirement.
Peer scanning yields the radio rather than competing for it: it stops entirely while a station firmware update is in flight, and refuses to run whenever the app cannot read the radio’s state. A firmware transfer that fails halfway leaves a station on a pole needing a ladder, so the unknown case refuses rather than permits.
Bounded by battery, not by hope
BLE and WiFi are bounded by encounter count, concurrency and battery — not by airtime, which they don’t consume. A phone standing still doesn’t work hard, and a phone in a crowd doesn’t run away with your battery either.
Phone-only nodes
You don’t need a radio to join
Because BLE and WiFi carry messages, install the app, pair with someone by QR, and your phone participates fully — carrying other people’s traffic and sending its own. The radio makes you reach further. It isn’t the price of entry.
Paper — the slow one
A route that needs no radio, no phone in range, and no power
A message can be turned into a QR code or a short link and carried by anything that moves: a photograph, a printout, a screen held up to somebody else’s camera, a note left on a board. The person who receives it scans it back into their app and it behaves like any other message.
It is the same sealed message either way. Paper is a route, not a downgrade — nobody between the two of you can read it, and that includes whoever carries the paper. It is the one route that still works when there is no device between you at all.
One message per code, and a long one will not fit. The app bounds the field as you write rather than refusing the message afterwards, so you learn the limit before you have written past it.
The rule that ties them together
Every transport carries its own budget, and no transport may spend another’s
LoRa is bounded by airtime. BLE and WiFi are bounded by encounter count, concurrency and battery. A message’s copy budget is decremented against whichever transport actually carried it — so a single fast encounter in one room can’t exhaust a budget designed for a scarce, slow link.
| Transport | Reach | Speed per encounter | Bounded by | Needs a radio |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LoRa | Kilometers, terrain-dependent | A handful of frames | Airtime | Yes |
| WiFi / LAN | One network | Whole stores, ~1 second | Encounters, battery | No |
| Bluetooth LE | A room | Many peers at once | Encounters, concurrency, battery | No |
Scroll the table sideways to see every column.
Your radio has a store. Your phone has a memory.
Put a store on a pole and it works for people who will never meet.