GoTenna Mesh: first 100% off-grid, mobile, long-range, consumer mesh network+SDK
kickstarter.comTheir first product was long, long, long delayed. This seems like a better product but as a company they seem to be pretty clueless. I backed the original product but they've not seen fit to include us in any marketing nor offer any incentive to upgrade.
The original product makes more sense since it's more likely that people who are hiking or whatever circumstances have them off of a cellular network will bring their devices. There's never going to be enough critical mass for someone to depend on this as something active in their area.
Hey there, we sent an email out first thing this morning to all our v1 preorder customers (thousands and thousands) before we publicly announced the preorder campaign for Mesh and the mail system we use for newsletters bungled it and didn't send it at all, except to 24 people and their dashboard didn't show this happened til hours later (so we assumed everything was fine). We are working to remedy it right now. You all were supposed to get the very first email. (Here is proof of me yelling at the company whose software is responsible for this on Twitter -- after they didn't reply to 4 attempts to reach them prior: https://twitter.com/danielaperdomo/status/781222497131827200
We are working in real-time to get this issue fixed, which was the opposite of our intention. I'm really sorry this happened.
Anyway, we like both products! Our award-winning v1 device gets great point to point range; this new one will do that plus offer the opportunity to relay messages via mesh in certain situations. And we can finally address demand internationally (Mesh can ship to 49 countries bc we're going through regulatory process in other regions).
And finally I guess I'd say that meshing is useful even among just 3 people who know each other. It has blue-sky possibilities that are really game-changing if adopted widely. I'm betting on both ;-)
@gotenna can you speak a little to why you're the first ones to do the kind of mesh network described in your campaign and in the title of this HN post? plenty of people have been working on MANET mesh stuff for 30+ years, what design decisions or other decisions make your mesh scalable/possible and not merely condemned to the academic or laboratory like so many other mesh projects?
That's a really good question and part of it is that this shit is super hard and takes forever and it's totally binary: it works or it doesn't and you spend a lot of time in the "doesn't" and that is soul-crushing for anyone. So there's that barrier to cross, haha. But I think you're asking more about what decisions as we designed/planned our mesh network topology has enabled us to do this.... and I think it's because we started by focusing on an MVP and then became philosophically attached to that MVP in the long-term for different reasons beyond just being a practical place to start.
What that meant for us is we decided to focus specifically on burst data. As a result our hardware can be lighter/smaller/less expensive and our networking protocols can scale to do things that other mesh projects have failed at.
For goTenna/goTenna Mesh, not doing real-time high-bandwidth media transmissions is a feature not a bug. Plus, focusing on packetized burst data transmissions doesn't preclude us from even sending a whole Netflix show over goTenna if we wanted to, because you could technically send a video over in lots of small packets and reconstruct it at the other end. Everything, after all, are 1's and 0's. (BTW with our SDK you can do that if you'd like! We're still gonna be focused on text & GPS in our own apps for now - for both goTenna v1 and goTenna Mesh).
Because we didn't have the choice of working on beautiful licensed spectrum used by limited users and less subject to regulations by government. We always had to by definition design goTenna (and now goTenna Mesh) to work on public spectrum which is a scarce and shared resource with potentially unlimited users and regulations that we have to fit into.
TL;DR: Focusing on burst data has been a really great way of scaling our technology from the first intelligent protocols that power v1 (which we call Aspen Prime) and goTenna Mesh (Aspen Grove).
Also perseverance. And naivete probably helped too because it's easier to get into something difficult when you have no clue how hard it's gonna be. We've learned a lot along the way since our first working prototypes in early 2013.
(Sorry if I sound barely coherent right now; I haven't slept in a few days leading up to goTenna Mesh launch!)
Thanks for mentioning the SDK — anyone can build atop goTenna now. Devs: build whatever you want over a really unique open data layer (totally off-grid, long-range). M2M, gaming, messaging — http://www.gotenna.com/pages/sdk
Anyone know if these will work along with the older GoTenna devices? I'm curious if the only difference is that the new devices can resend messages on enabling a mesh network.
In different places in this thread we've already discussed that different frequencies & different regulations means we couldn't have the v1 product Mesh and we means we can't have the Mesh product work with the v1. BUT I will say that we already have SMS network relay available for both v1 and Mesh which is the first time goTenna interconnects with central connectivity... and that, plus mesh, and some of the other stuff we're planning, is all meant to continue building out a parallel off-grid network that is resilient and scalable but that can plug into central infrastructure in creative ways that improves the communication stack for both on-grid and off-grid uses.
The TL;DR of it is: How do we build infrastructure-free infrastructure? It starts small but we have, I think, Big Ideas ;-)
Nick from goTenna here. goTenna Mesh devices will not be interoperable with our first-gen goTenna devices because they operate on different frequencies. We would have loved to enable interoperability but that's physically and legally impossible due to regulatory restrictions.
Did you not think of including your original GoTenna backers? This is the first I'm reading of this - you didn't send out email to current customers?
I assume you're not going to give your original Kickstarter backers any discount even though we endured months and months of delays and broken delivery promises?
Hi you asked this twice in the thread; just replied to your other comment but copy/pasting here to be thorough:
"Hey there, we sent an email out first thing this morning to all our v1 preorder customers (thousands and thousands) before we publicly announced the preorder campaign for Mesh and the mail system we use for newsletters bungled it and didn't send it at all, except to 24 people and their dashboard didn't show this happened til hours later (so we assumed everything was fine). We are working to remedy it right now. You all were supposed to get the very first email. (Here is proof of me yelling at the company whose software is responsible for this on Twitter -- after they didn't reply to 4 attempts to reach them prior: https://twitter.com/danielaperdomo/status/781222497131827200 We are working in real-time to get this issue fixed, which was the opposite of our intention. I'm really sorry this happened."
The email's in the mail. I guess I should have been grateful for what, 2 hours advanced notice. You obviously have little loyalty to your crowd sourced folks. Seems to me a LOT of advanced notice and some extra information to the original crowd sourced folks would have been appropriate.
Another reason why I'm NEVER crowd sourcing again. The very people that should get the MOST consideration (after all we're basically throwing money at a promise) actually get the least consideration (we often are robbed or get a 1/2 ass implementation.
The older GoTenna devices use the MURS band, the new mesh devices use 33cm band. Totally incompatible.
Right, the other thing beyond being different frequencies is that we can't mesh on MURS frequencies given the FCC's rules on that band. So we moved to the civilian ISM band where store-and-forward is allowed. So we've had to negotiate not just with the laws of physics but the laws of... regulators ;-)
So psyched for Daniela and Jorge--this is the product they had in mind when they first started the company.