No internet required… In this video, I build a public Reticulum node and test whether it can bridge completely different networks into one encrypted communication path. I send messages from a normal phone over LTE, through the internet and Starlink, then off-grid over LoRa—eventually using a $20 drone-mounted relay to reach a phone with no internet connection at all.
That was the thing that made me think reticulum was worth pursuing actually. It does work over a lot of stuff besides lora. You can mesh WiFi routers or other protocols. The issue is bandwidth ota since so much is dedicated to commercial stuff, but you can route reticulum over that including through i2p for anonymity. Meshtastic very much focuses on lora only, reticulum does not.
Yep, I agree with all of that. The original source here is specifically using LoRA, which is why I focused upon it, but Reticulum is certainly more than that.