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Low-bandwidth / off-grid meshes

Meshtastic

Open-source LoRa mesh for off-grid text messages, positions and telemetry

Text & telemetry only active

Updated 29 Oct 2026

Internet trafficNo. It carries short text messages, positions and telemetry. An MQTT bridge can relay messages through an internet broker; it does not give you web access.
Node count9,619 positioned nodes heard on the public MQTT broker in the last 24 h (community map; the true total is higher) (as of 29 Oct 2026, source)
GeographyGlobal, strongest in the United States and Europe. There is no official total.
RegionsGlobal, United States, Europe, Russia, Taiwan
Tech
  • LoRa on sub-GHz licence-exempt bands
  • Managed-flood routing with a hop limit
  • ESP32 and nRF52 boards
  • Android, iOS and web clients
  • Optional MQTT bridge to the internet
Typical costHardware only, no fees. A basic board such as the Heltec V3 is listed at US$17.90 to US$19.90 by its manufacturer. We did not verify UK retail prices in pounds.
BandwidthVery low. In the UK (EU_868) the presets run from about 0.34 kbit/s (Long Moderate) to about 10.94 kbit/s (Short Fast); the faster Turbo presets (up to 21.88 kbit/s) are not available in EU_868. Text payloads are roughly 200 bytes. Typical range is 2 to 5 km; the claimed record is 331 km.
LegalNo licence needed within the limits. UK: 868 MHz (Meshtastic region EU_868). The 869.40-869.65 MHz slot allows 500 mW e.r.p. with a 10% duty cycle; most of the rest of the band allows 25 mW e.r.p. (Ofcom IR 2030 v1.16). US: 902-928 MHz under FCC Part 15, +30 dBm in the Meshtastic US region.
GovernanceGrassroots open-source project (GPL-3.0 firmware) founded by Kevin Hester in 2020. The trademark is held by Meshtastic LLC.
UK notesUK: licence-exempt 868 MHz band under Ofcom IR 2030 (v1.16, published 7 April 2026). Most of the band is limited to 25 mW e.r.p.; the 869.40-869.65 MHz slot allows 500 mW e.r.p. with spectrum-access techniques per EN 300 220 (such as listen before talk) or, alternatively, a duty cycle of 10% or less. 915 MHz equipment is for the US and similar regions, not the UK. On the meshmap.net data for 29 October 2026, 230 positioned nodes sat in a rectangle covering the UK and Ireland (149 heard in the last hour) and 5 in a rectangular Coventry-area box about 50 km across; many nodes blur their position, so treat these as lower bounds. The official local-groups page lists two UK entries: Mesh Hub UK (https://meshhub.uk/) and New Welsh Mesh, whose website domain had lapsed as of 29 October 2026, so we do not link it. Trap: "Birmingham Mesh" on meshmap.me is Birmingham, Alabama (915 MHz), not Birmingham, UK.
Links

How it works

Meshtastic is open-source firmware for cheap LoRa radio boards. LoRa is a long-range, low-data-rate radio technique on licence-exempt sub-GHz bands. Each node rebroadcasts what it hears, up to a hop limit. The default hop limit is 3 and cannot exceed 7.

Routing is "managed flooding": a node listens briefly before it rebroadcasts, and nodes further away are more likely to relay first. Direct messages can use next-hop routing, where the relay that carried a reply is remembered and used next time, falling back to flooding. Broadcasts always flood. A phone connects to a node over Bluetooth, or a computer over USB serial or the web client.

How to join

  1. Buy a board sold for your region. In the UK that means the 868 MHz variant. "863-928 MHz" printed on some boards is a hardware tuning range, not a legal band.
  2. Attach an antenna before you power the radio. Meshtastic warns that powering it without one could damage the radio chip.
  3. Flash the firmware with the web flasher at flasher.meshtastic.org. It needs Chrome or Edge and a USB cable that carries data. Export your config before any full erase.
  4. Connect with the phone app, or the web client over USB.
  5. Set the region to EU_868 in the UK, or US in the United States.
  6. Look at the community map and the local groups page to see who is nearby. The Meshtastic Discord is linked from the project's community page.

What it realistically gives you

Text messages of roughly 200 bytes, position reports, telemetry and acknowledgements. In the UK (region EU_868) the presets run from about 0.34 kbit/s (Long Moderate) to about 10.94 kbit/s (Short Fast); Long Fast is about 1.07 kbit/s. The faster Turbo presets (up to 21.88 kbit/s) use 500 kHz bandwidth and are not available in EU_868. These are theoretical maximums before packet headers, hops and retransmissions. Typical range is 2 to 5 km; the claimed record is 331 km.

It does not carry internet traffic. It cannot browse the web, stream or move large files. An MQTT bridge can pass messages through an internet broker, but traffic from the public broker is zero-hop and does not spread through local meshes.

The node count on this site is positioned nodes seen on the public MQTT broker in the last 24 hours: 9,619 on 29 October 2026. Nodes without a position or without an MQTT uplink are missing, so the true number is higher. A different community list holds 29,834 nodes ever recorded; the two are not comparable.

Caveats

  • Many nodes publish blurred positions, so local counts are fuzzy.
  • The MQTT documentation advises against enabling both uplink and downlink on busy channels, and against using the default key on a private broker, which floods meshes.

Trap: "Birmingham Mesh" on meshmap.me is Birmingham, Alabama, running 915 MHz. It is not Birmingham, UK.

Sources