Cell signal isn't always everywhere. A friend of mine wanted to shoot a documentary in the middle of nowhere. I made a couple of modules that have GPS and LoRa radios to show where the other group is at all times. Easier than reading GPS coordinates over the radio and plotting them on maps.

This documentary never happened and so the project sits around collecting dust, but it was a fun weekend.

(Note, this isn't quite LoRaWAN or Meshtastic, which implies you want to uplink this to the Internet, but the idea is that off-the-grid radio links are still useful.)

I play airsoft in the middle of nowhere, when 300 people show up the cell towers can’t hold up and my phone signal is useless. Using LoRa radios we can still communicate long distances in the forest without using our voices.

My second use case is I build airsoft and paintball digital flags and scoring boxes using LED strips and microcontrollers. I plan to test and use LoRa radios for them to communicate through the forest and relay game status or even allow refs to control things for dynamic gameplay.

When the cell towers all went out in Asheville and the surrounding region, I definitely wished we had a backup mesh network, even if only for emergency services.

Definitely not cell signal everywhere, the town I'm in has it, but go on a longer hiking trip into the mountains and you can potentially be 20-30 miles from the nearest house/road/person with zero cell service on any provider.

Even just a few miles up the OHV trail near my house has no service anymore. Pretty much none of the mountain area around the valley does.

That said I carry a garmin inreach, because while stuff like meshtastic is handy to link groups together and use for fun and utility, for safety you want something that works anywhere.

It’s good for music festivals in the middle of nowhere when cell service is either spotty or so overwhelmed with all the people.

the firmware releases were infrequent, the distro is not fully hardened, the linux kernel is old, and imagine having to get this notice now, at this point, and know that there wont be any further updates that fix future vulns. if u have this product, your firmware is now frozen and youre vulnerable to every future issue that affects it. looks like their support stops in 2029, but imagine these devices stay in place for another 10 years, this is a nightmare scenario for anyone with large deployments. in lots of cases we expect some devices to be in place for up to 45 yrs. still, this system wont make it past 2037, max. imagine running it for 12 more years without any fixes. untenable.

Wouldn't the affected customers say that buying from a more expensive, established vendor like Cisco is supposed to be a way to spend the actual cash now to avoid abandonware problems later?

(And I suppose people who have been burned before would just say "ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha!")

> wiring the whole building with wifi

Now there's an oxymoron

That sounds like exactly the sort of use case where I usually see lorawan deployed