It’s not really a “you need to bypass TCP” and more of a “TCP traffic could be censored”… just like UDP, DNS, or really any other kind of networked traffic.
Reticulum isn’t necessarily immune to this, it just supports a variety of protocols as a mesh network, so TCP isn’t something who’s failure would make the network impossible to use (but good luck accessing any traditional website without TCP).
For example, you might be able to communicate from your Android phone running a Reticulum-compatible app to a separate nearby device over Bluetooth, then that device broadcasts a signal over LoRa, which hits someone else’s LoRa-compatible radio, which then connects over a USB-C cable to their laptop, which is plugged into their router, which can then send the traffic over TCP, where it’s picked up by someone elsewhere using the internet. If TCP traffic is blocked, say, by their local government, maybe their LoRa radio just broadcasts to another LoRa radio, and another, and another, etc, until enough of them chained together is able to reach the recipient. Hence, TCP wouldn’t strictly be required, thus preventing censorship of Reticulum through blocking TCP connections. (though this would still reduce how many ways you could theoretically get to people, as if that person ONLY has access to TCP as the start of their connection to the mesh, they’d be cut off)
Of course, the government could also try jamming radio signals, then making LoRa useless, but if they do that and don’t block TCP traffic, then you still have options.
Unfortunately, I wouldn’t call Reticulum an internet replacement, nor do I think it could ever be without still relying on the kind of large-scale, high-throughput infrastructure we have for the internet today. It just doesn’t have enough bandwidth, and it’s difficult to run anything requiring low latency if every connection requires hopping through a thousand peers to get to someone on the other side of the planet who, say, wants to play the same online game as you.
If I remember the documentation properly, Reticulum is capable of 40 mbps maximum throughput speed. That’s over Ethernet or serial links or high-speed wireless networks such as Wi-Fi.
Over LoRa you get quite bandwidth constrained, but you also have a lot of resiliency.
With that said, you can have high bandwidth, but high latency as well because of needing to hop multiple piers to get to your destination.
Once you make the connection though, you can download at a pretty decent clip if all the nodes in the middle can support that bandwidth transfer.
Edit: I should already mention that there is a way to access HTTP webpages over reticulum. Look up rserver and meshbrowser. The webpage is accessed like http://destinationhash/, similar to http://longtoraddress.onion/. Since reticulum is end-to-end encrypted, there’s no need to have HTTPS.
Once you make the connection though, you can download at a pretty decent clip if all the nodes in the middle can support that bandwidth transfer.
Of course, while you’re doing it, you’re maxing out the connections in between, too. It has problems with scale and bandwidth segmentation. Once you take it off the mainstream internet, you’d be lucky to keep a large neighborhood mesh working :(
I think it depends on how those nodes were communicating. If they were communicating via low bandwidth LORA, then yes, I could absolutely see that. But they could also be communicating over point-to-point laser links, in which case you could still maintain a very large connection pipe.
I do see your point, though, in that in order to have a more decentralized infrastructure, we are going to have to accept lower bandwidth than what we are currently used to on the centralized internet.
Considering I already route most of my internet connection over Tor for most day-to-day things anyway, this is something that I am already accepting and getting used to. So the transition won’t be as hard for me as it would be for some others.
That does sound fun. I currently have Columba (android lxmf/nomadnet browser) set to go tcp to mishmesh, but i have a tor/i2p client called Invizible installed that I use to route most of my internet traffic over Tor on a normal basis as is and I could just turn on I2P and see if I could get Colomba to route over it.
It’s not really a “you need to bypass TCP” and more of a “TCP traffic could be censored”… just like UDP, DNS, or really any other kind of networked traffic.
Reticulum isn’t necessarily immune to this, it just supports a variety of protocols as a mesh network, so TCP isn’t something who’s failure would make the network impossible to use (but good luck accessing any traditional website without TCP).
For example, you might be able to communicate from your Android phone running a Reticulum-compatible app to a separate nearby device over Bluetooth, then that device broadcasts a signal over LoRa, which hits someone else’s LoRa-compatible radio, which then connects over a USB-C cable to their laptop, which is plugged into their router, which can then send the traffic over TCP, where it’s picked up by someone elsewhere using the internet. If TCP traffic is blocked, say, by their local government, maybe their LoRa radio just broadcasts to another LoRa radio, and another, and another, etc, until enough of them chained together is able to reach the recipient. Hence, TCP wouldn’t strictly be required, thus preventing censorship of Reticulum through blocking TCP connections. (though this would still reduce how many ways you could theoretically get to people, as if that person ONLY has access to TCP as the start of their connection to the mesh, they’d be cut off)
Of course, the government could also try jamming radio signals, then making LoRa useless, but if they do that and don’t block TCP traffic, then you still have options.
Unfortunately, I wouldn’t call Reticulum an internet replacement, nor do I think it could ever be without still relying on the kind of large-scale, high-throughput infrastructure we have for the internet today. It just doesn’t have enough bandwidth, and it’s difficult to run anything requiring low latency if every connection requires hopping through a thousand peers to get to someone on the other side of the planet who, say, wants to play the same online game as you.
If I remember the documentation properly, Reticulum is capable of 40 mbps maximum throughput speed. That’s over Ethernet or serial links or high-speed wireless networks such as Wi-Fi.
Over LoRa you get quite bandwidth constrained, but you also have a lot of resiliency.
With that said, you can have high bandwidth, but high latency as well because of needing to hop multiple piers to get to your destination.
Once you make the connection though, you can download at a pretty decent clip if all the nodes in the middle can support that bandwidth transfer.
Edit: I should already mention that there is a way to access HTTP webpages over reticulum. Look up rserver and meshbrowser. The webpage is accessed like http://destinationhash/, similar to http://longtoraddress.onion/. Since reticulum is end-to-end encrypted, there’s no need to have HTTPS.
Of course, while you’re doing it, you’re maxing out the connections in between, too. It has problems with scale and bandwidth segmentation. Once you take it off the mainstream internet, you’d be lucky to keep a large neighborhood mesh working :(
I think it depends on how those nodes were communicating. If they were communicating via low bandwidth LORA, then yes, I could absolutely see that. But they could also be communicating over point-to-point laser links, in which case you could still maintain a very large connection pipe.
I do see your point, though, in that in order to have a more decentralized infrastructure, we are going to have to accept lower bandwidth than what we are currently used to on the centralized internet.
Considering I already route most of my internet connection over Tor for most day-to-day things anyway, this is something that I am already accepting and getting used to. So the transition won’t be as hard for me as it would be for some others.
I feel ya, I leave I2P running just to support the cause.
If you want a fun side project, you could pipe reticulum over I2P, there are at least a handful of nodes out there.
That does sound fun. I currently have Columba (android lxmf/nomadnet browser) set to go tcp to mishmesh, but i have a tor/i2p client called Invizible installed that I use to route most of my internet traffic over Tor on a normal basis as is and I could just turn on I2P and see if I could get Colomba to route over it.
I see, thank you. :)