About

What this site is

getuncabled.com is an independent technical reference on community mesh networks: how they work, what they can realistically carry, how to join one and how to build a node. It leans towards the UK, but most of the networks covered are international.

It exists to make dependence on a single internet provider easier to reduce, without overstating what a mesh can do.

getuncabled.com is an independent, non-commercial reference.

What it is not

• Not a network. The site does not run, operate or vouch for any mesh. Each network is run by its own volunteers.
• Not legal or regulatory advice. See the disclaimer.
• Not a promise of free internet. A mesh gives you internet access only if a member of it shares an uplink. LoRa meshes carry short text messages and sensor data, not web browsing or video.
• Not a sales site. Nothing here is sponsored. If that changes, it will be disclosed on the page concerned. Hardware is recommended on technical fit, not on affiliate income.

Editorial policy

• Claims are stated conservatively and traced to primary sources where possible: a network's own documentation, a regulator's published text, or a named third-party source.
• Every guide and explainer lists its sources at the bottom and shows an "Updated" date.
• Where a figure or fact could not be verified, the page says so with a visible marker such as "not confirmed" or "unverified". Nothing is estimated to fill a gap.
• If a network cannot carry internet traffic, the page says so plainly.
• Mistakes are corrected, and the page's "Updated" date changes when its facts do.

Corrections

Corrections are welcome. A contact channel for reporting errors has not been set up yet; it will be listed on this page once it exists. When it is, please include the page URL and a source for the correct figure.

How we count nodes

The counters on the homepage are produced by small scripts that read a public map or directory for each network. Each counter measures something different, so the figures are not comparable between networks, and they should never be added together. All of them undercount real-world activity: they only see nodes that report to the source in question.

Details and caveats

• Meshtastic. meshmap.net is built from nodes heard on the public Meshtastic MQTT broker. A node is counted only if it has a position and was heard in the last 24 hours. Many nodes publish a deliberately blurred position, and nodes that never uplink to MQTT are invisible to this count.
• MeshCore. The map records the time of each node's last advert. Repeaters advertise infrequently, so a 7-day window is used. Some devices have unset clocks and report adverts dated in the future; those entries are dropped.
• Reticulum. rmap.world is an opt-in, community-built directory built from announces, with no official API documentation. Only entries that are interfaces are counted, not services built on top of Reticulum.
• AREDN. AREDN is an amateur-radio network, so its nodes belong to licensed operators. The world map already prunes old nodes.
• NYC Mesh. The count is the number of records with status "active". That status is maintained by hand. Street addresses in the database are never read into this site; only the count is kept.
• Freifunk. Each community pushes its own number to a shared directory, along with the date of its last update. A large share of the total comes from communities whose entry had not changed for over 30 days when we last checked (about 25,000 of 41,000 on 2026-10-29), so treat it as "reported by communities", not "online now". The directory lists German, Swiss, Austrian, Luxembourgish and French communities; it has no UK community.
• Regional counts. Where a UK figure is shown it is the number of nodes inside a simple latitude/longitude rectangle (latitude 49.8 to 60.9, longitude -8.7 to 1.8). It includes most of Great Britain and Ireland and the Isle of Man, but also a sliver of northern France, and it excludes the Channel Islands and the far west of Ireland. Read it as a rough "UK and Ireland" count.
• Guifi.net has no working public node-count endpoint that we could find, so no live counter is shown for it. Any figure on a network page is a published figure with its date.

Refresh and fallback

• Most counters are read at most every 6 hours. MeshCore is read at most every 24 hours, because its data file is very large.
• The homepage itself is rebuilt at most hourly. Only the resulting number and its timestamp are kept, not the source data.
• If a source cannot be reached, the counter shows its last good value with that value's own timestamp, or a hand-maintained baseline snapshot labelled with the date it was read. If neither exists it shows an em dash. The site never fills the gap with a guess.
• The same figures are available as JSON at /api/counters.

Sources

The public pages and endpoints behind each counter are listed in the sources at the foot of this page: meshmap.net (Meshtastic), map.meshcore.io (MeshCore), rmap.world (Reticulum), the AREDN world map, the NYC Mesh node database and the Freifunk community directory. None of them publishes formal API terms; they can change shape or stop working without notice, which is why every counter carries its own date.

Automated access

Counters are fetched with the user agent getuncabled-bot/1.0 (+https://getuncabled.com/about). A machine-readable index of the site is at /llms.txt.