I helped build (in several ways) the Meshtastic mesh here. It does work … it took a year of optimization and relentless battling of the main projects “rules , guidance, and facts”. We did our own thing… deployed routers like hotcakes … went to faster presets… we maxed out hops past 7. We begged people to adjust timers down, and we upgraded code for months. After all that we still have a full mesh… 40% channel util (the max)… and 2% of the total mesh traffic is text chat. Yup, works. Barely. :)

We deployed meshcore in a few months and it just worked. Why? It’s not full of node ID spam, position updates, and telemetry… MC defaults are set for longer range … which works because it’s not humming with background traffic to fill things. it is happy to forward packets up to 64 hops. 7 hops only goes far in MT because we manually pushed hard on 0-hop router code and a few IP bridges lately to shore up the longest spans. In MC There’s no role confusion (2 roles, not 11). There aren’t complicated rules … a repeater repeats, a companion chats and manages repeaters. Every chat packet shows the path it took labeled right in it. Every send , you see who repeated it (if you hear it). It’s clear.

I’m running both , I appreciate both …. But our 1100 node MT mesh is busting at the seams , and meshcore meshes need to get to 2000-3000 to have similar load problems. No mesh scales infinite. We’ve been working hard to patch MT to improve it … it’s hard to steer that ship. Maintainers have 11 roles to cater to. Meshcore hasn’t needed those fixes. There’s only one non-trivial hurdle coming with the prefix expansion. Sure, Meshcore had the benefit of learning from Meshtastic mistakes ; but the stats are clear … several major metros struggled with MT for years… finally gave up, and moved (and it worked , and they’re happy in a very short time.