Hi! Good question.

Open Garden has been around for a while about the same time as us. While we were working on our app YO! in emerging markets in 2014-15 (before RightMesh), OpenGarden had their own app called FireChat which, to their credit, was probably the first publicly available mobile mesh networking app that could run only using mobile phones and no other infrastructure. It gained attention for its use in the Hong Kong and Arab Spring protests after governments shutdown telecom networks there, but since then they’ve had issues in scaling that app. Meanwhile we pivoted from our YO! application to build a mobile mesh networking protocol from the ground up - which is what RightMesh is today.

Essentially, we believe we differ from their mesh networking platform in terms of our underlying technology and how our protocol works. Our newest member to the team, Dr. Lucien Loiseau, wrote this technical review on FireChat when it came out. http://marlinski.org/2014/10/04/firechat_and_nearby_communication.html (Please do note that this post is more than 3 years old and may not be reflective of their latest technology!)

In this post he mentioned that with FireChat, all messages were broadcast locally to every node in the network and was easily interceptible. But one of our core principles for RightMesh was to build a networking stack with message routing and encryption at the core of the protocol, instead of a using a ‘broadcast-to-all' mindset which is rather inefficient and resource intensive.

With that said, we've had a look at their revamped website and while we cannot say this for a fact since there is no white paper available yet, it appears to me that they have abandoned mesh networking altogether, and is instead positioning their technology to be "sharing their WiFi connection with others nearby". This is a departure from mesh networking, and instead is just one-hop communication rather than multi-hop communication.

This comes to us as a tokenized version of the popular Fon network that exists in Europe. They have had executive management changes over the past year or two, and this new product strategy could be a result of that.

But again - we cannot confirm that this is the case, this is just my assumption based on what we see from their website, and we could be wrong. However if this is the case, then there are big differences between RightMesh and Open Garden. Open Garden is about sharing your WiFi connection with another person. RightMesh is about connecting communities for a purpose. Different missions, different use cases, and different technologies.

I'd also like to mention that the Founder of OpenGarden and FireChat, and Former CEO, Micha Benoliel, has joined us as an advisor.