When I wrote LPWAN Meshes: Reticulum, Where I Landed earlier this year, I covered Reticulum as Mark Qvist’s reference Python implementation: rnsd, Sideband, NomadNet, all built on RNS. That was accurate at the time, and it undersold what was already starting to happen underneath it. Reticulum was never meant to be a Python project. It is a protocol, and a protocol with only one implementation isn’t decentralised yet, it’s just a single point of failure with good branding.

LPWAN Meshes: Reticulum, Where I Landed covered Reticulum as a communications stack: transport-agnostic, cryptographically addressed, built for chat and file transfer over LoRa, packet radio, or whatever medium is available. This post is narrower on purpose: it breaks down the specific mechanics of moving a sensor reading, not a conversation, through Reticulum: which delivery method to pick, what a reading actually costs in packets and bits per second, and what already exists in the open-source community to build on rather than reinvent.