The Limited Utility of Reticulum
2026-02-13
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I've been playing with the Reticulum mesh network since early last summer. My ROOPHLOCH entry last year was powered by Reticulum, and I currently operate, to the best of my knowledge, the only LoRa RNode in my town. The premise and design of the project fascinate me. However, I strongly suspect that Reticulum will never gain enough of a foothold to be a viable communication system to rival existing cellular and WiFi networks. Why is that?
Any time a new technology is introduced, it faces the challenge of adopting new users. Eventually it reaches a critical mass of both size and functionality that it becomes a mainstay. But those two factors--size and functionality--are conspiring against Reticulum, and they work in tandem.
I would argue that Reticulum doesn't have a high-utility service or feature that might make people actively adopt it. rnsh (remote shell) and rncp (file transfer) utilities exist, and they are useful, but they don't do anything SSH and SFTP don't already do. Networking devices are not shipping with Reticulum compatibility out of the box, so people need to buy separate equipment and configure separate programs to make it work.
If a code library was built that applications could drop in as a replacement for TCP/IP networking, that would make Reticulum extremely useful and easy to adopt. Reticulum already solves a lot of low-level networking and routing issues that TCP/IP cannot--if it was easy to build applications on top of it, I think adoption would rise quickly. But since Reticulum works so radically differently than TCP/IP, application designers would need to rethink how networking is used, which is effort they don't want to put in when the Reticulum community is so small and hard to monetize.
Further, there isn't much physical infrastructure for Reticulum that is separate from already-existing TCP/IP infrastructure. Many Reticulum nodes are accessible through TCP servers, which require an underlying IP network, including all its shortcomings and reliance on centralized infrastructure. Many people rightly ask what the point is of a networking stack that is supposed to fix the problems of traditional Internet, when the dominant implementation of that stack relies on traditional Internet to operate.
I think Reticulum will be more desirable to join if people can easily find peers even when they're "off-grid" in the IP sense. People might be incentivized to buy mesh devices and USB antennas if, once they do so, they're instantly connected to a large, active network with diverse services and can easily communicate with their peers.
The problem is that these two issues feed into each other. If Reticulum doesn't provide high utility, then people will not be incentivized to build a large and robust mesh network to support it. Meanwhile, without a robust and active network, any tool or application designed to run on Reticulum will by nature have limited utility. I'm not sure how to break that cycle.
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[Last updated: 2026-02-13]