I’ve spent 30 years watching tech cycles come and go, from the first dial-up modems in rural Austria to the mesh networks I’m currently stringing across the Australian bush. Each time a “next big thing” arrives, we see the same pattern: a frantic rush to centralise, followed by a slow, painful enclosure of what should have been a common resource.

The current noise around AI in open source feels different. It feels heavier. There’s a justified fear that AI-generated code is hollowing out our commons. Maintainers are being buried under a drift of unvetted, mediocre pull requests, while a handful of platform monopolies strip-mine decades of community work to feed their proprietary black boxes.

I’m tired. Not the kind of tired that a good night’s sleep or a weekend off the grid can fix. It’s a deeper, more pervasive exhaustion—the fatigue of living in a culture of relentless, performative positivity. In the tech world, we’re told to “crush it,” to “move fast,” and to embrace every new “game-changer” with uncritical enthusiasm. If you’re not a believer, you’re a “naysayer” or, worse, a “blocker” of progress.

In the world of Internet of Things (IoT), the sub-GHz spectrum is a frontier of immense promise, offering the holy grail of long-range and low-power communication. Two fundamentally different philosophies are vying to define this frontier. On one side stands Wi-Fi HaLow (IEEE 802.11ah), a direct evolution of the familiar, IP-based Wi-Fi standard, engineered for higher bandwidth and seamless integration. On the other lies the diverse and adaptable LoRa landscape, a collection of distinct networking protocols all built upon the same remarkable long-range radio technology.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve pulled apart four different LPWAN mesh technologies. Now it’s time to bring those findings together and look at which tool fits which job on the property or in the community.

There is no “perfect” protocol. What we have is a set of tools with different trade-offs. I’ve evaluated all four across five parameters to help cut through the marketing noise and get to the technical reality.

The ClusterDuck Protocol (CDP) was where my mesh networking journey truly began. The story behind Project OWL (Organisation, Whereabouts, and Logistics)—students building emergency communication networks after Hurricane Maria—resonated deeply, highlighting a technology designed not for hobbyists or industry, but for saving lives when infrastructure fails. While I found its concepts “much better thought through” from the outset, the project’s slow pace and patchy hardware support meant my personal involvement never truly moved beyond some initial tinkering.

ASUS ExpertBooks are popular enterprise laptops with a well-priced combination of hardware and solid build quality. However, installing Ubuntu on these laptops can be challenging due to UEFI issues. In this blog post, I am documenting the challenges and the steps to overcome these issues and successfully install Ubuntu on ASUS ExpertBooks.

Whilst UEFI is arguably useful, the choices made by ASUS in their BIOS settings are problematic. Whilst I have no knowledge of the exact reasons for these choices, they seem to be overly restrictive and limiting for advanced users. Enforcing the device to boot only from the UEFI firmware can be problematic for advanced users who want to dual-boot or install other operating systems.

After years of experimenting with various LPWAN mesh networking technologies, I’ve settled on Reticulum as my primary LoRa mesh platform. It emerged as the clear frontrunner not because it’s simpler than the rudimentary Meshtastic (it isn’t), nor because it’s overtly more feature-rich than the structured MeshCore, but because its design philosophy fundamentally aligns with what matters most: privacy, resilience, and true decentralisation. It supports multiple bearer protocols, making it a powerful tool for building a future decentralised network.

While Meshtastic serves as a solid introduction to LPWAN mesh networking, MeshCore represents a move toward more structured networks, particularly when the limits of ad-hoc flooding become a bottleneck. It addresses the “airtime” congestion common in simpler protocols, offering a far more robust path for community-scale infrastructure where a “best effort” approach isn’t enough. MeshCore is built for managed deployments and regional sensor networks where reliability and structured routing are the priority.

For many new to LPWAN mesh networking, MeshTastic often appears as a starting point due to its affordability and active community. It can get you from zero to sending a basic mesh message relatively quickly. For some, it may seem like a convenient entry into mesh networking.

In this post, I’ll dive into what makes MeshTastic tick, where it excels, and where it falls short based on my own experience using it across various scenarios.

Long-range Sub-GHz wireless mesh networks have become essential for modern communication, particularly in remote areas where traditional infrastructure is impractical or impossible. By utilising lower frequencies (typically below 1 GHz), Sub-GHz networks can achieve remarkable range, low power consumption, and the ability to penetrate obstacles such as buildings and dense forests.

These characteristics make Sub-GHz mesh networks ideal for applications in IoT, outdoor communication, emergency response, and industrial networks. But with numerous technologies now available, choosing the right one for your needs can be challenging.

In the first two parts of this series, we explored why community telecoms matter and how resilient mesh networks can save lives during emergencies. Now comes the question I’m asked most often: “That sounds great, but how do I actually build one?”

This is the knowledge I wish I’d had when I started.

If my journey from those early Austrian tele-working centres to deploying mesh networks across remote Australian properties has taught me anything: the hardest part isn’t the technology—it’s overcoming the psychological barrier between “consumer” and “creator.” We’ve been conditioned to believe telecommunications infrastructure is something large corporations build, not something communities can create themselves.

In an emergency, information is as vital as water. The official advice is clear: “leave early.” But how do you act on that advice when the power is out, the mobile network is congested to the point of failure, and the emergency broadcaster’s tower has been consumed by the very fire you’re trying to flee?

This isn’t a hypothetical. As Fiannuala Morgan chillingly documented in her article, “No power, no phone, no radio: why comms dropped out during the Central Victorian fires{target="_blank”}", this is the reality for communities across Australia. The wholesale replacement of resilient copper landlines with power-dependent NBN connections, coupled with the shutdown of the 3G network, has created a communications infrastructure that is dangerously brittle in the face of climate-fuelled disasters.