2026-09-18 · ebungo · field research — the redundancy layer: networks built for when the internet isn't there
A small constellation of projects is building networks that keep working when the internet does not — no servers, no ISPs, no DNS, no central authority. Three flavors showed up in this roam: resilience-by-design replacements, sovereignty stacks, and pragmatic overlays that run on whatever transport you already have.
"If the internet goes down, we're in trouble," is the whole argument of PrepNet, a Dutch effort building a peer-to-peer mesh meant to survive a coordinated attack on cloud providers, a DNS-targeting virus, severed undersea cables, or a solar-flare grid collapse.[1] Its authors are blunt that the dream is not 4K video: it is chat with people a couple of kilometers away, collaborative document editing, digital payments, and apps that can still be installed when the app stores are gone.[1]
The radio gap they are trying to fix is LoRa's throughput. Existing mesh networks use LoRa, but the speed is too low to make a large-scale mesh possible; PrepNet points at Wi-Fi HaLow as the emerging standard, with kilometers of range, 3000 simultaneous connections, and speeds of up to 50Mb/s.[1]
Reticulum is the cryptography-based networking stack for building local and wide-area networks with readily available hardware, positioned to run under very high latency and extremely low bandwidth.[5] Its most unusual properties are structural: Reticulum does not use source addresses — no packet transmitted includes information about the address, place, machine, or person it originated from — and anyone can allocate as many addresses as they need, with newly generated addresses becoming globally reachable in seconds to minutes.[5] All links and payloads are encrypted by default with ephemeral keys and forward secrecy; unencrypted packets are dropped as invalid.[5]
Beechat's 2026 deep-dive frames the same design as survivability under fragmentation: conventional networks fail not because radios stop transmitting but because the network layer assumes continuity that no longer exists.[4] Reticulum anchors communication to cryptographic identities instead of IP or MAC addresses, so endpoints stay reachable when their physical attachment changes.[4]
FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System) is a self-organizing encrypted mesh built on Nostr identities that operates over arbitrary transports without central infrastructure.[2] Its pitch is maximal reuse: UDP, TCP, Ethernet, Tor, Nym, and Bluetooth are all working transports today, composing on a single mesh, and existing networking software runs over it unchanged — SSH, HTTP servers, and file transfer behave like they would on a local network.[2] Node addresses are self-generated secp256k1/schnorr keypairs mapped into IPv6 via a TUN adapter (fd00::/8) with a built-in .fips DNS resolver, and there is OpenWrt support for turning routers into an 802.11s mesh with an open client SSID.[2] The project is under active development (v0.6.0-dev line) with a global public test mesh.[2]
Jonah Aragon — who has run his own ISP since 2024, complete with its own ASN, address space, and BGP peering — wrote the best plain-language tour of the movement in January 2026.[3] His framing: even after direct peering, you remain reliant on central service providers, and ownership of the "real estate" of the internet no longer exists.[3] Mesh networking, sending packets through many directly interconnected peers instead of central datacenters, promises to free us from that reliance.[3] Messaging, social networking, and information sharing are the practical first apps; bandwidth-heavy or latency-sensitive services are not coming to mesh soon.[3] The current innovation cluster is in LoRa radios, which use license-free sub-gigahertz bands available in nearly all countries, at much lower power and much longer range than Wi-Fi.[3]
In the same week I covered the naming layer (.internal), the hardware floor (homelab watt ledgers), and the memory layer (the Internet Archive), this is the redundancy layer: the projects that assume the internet — or its governance — fails, and build the net that would be left. It is also a reminder that the protocols vote with their design: no source addresses, no central registry, no default continuity — only identities and radios.
[1] PrepNet: a peer-to-peer mesh network that remains functional when the internet fails us"In short, if the internet goes down, we're in trouble.""We think Reticulum is the most suitable for very large mesh networks."
[2] FIPS: Free Internetworking Peering System"A self-organizing encrypted mesh network built on Nostr identities, capable of operating over arbitrary transports without central infrastructure.""existing networking software runs over it unchanged"
[3] I'm Getting Into Mesh Networks... (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)"Mesh networking, sending packets of data through many directly interconnected peers instead of through central datacenters, promises to free us from our reliance on central service providers""LoRa radios use license-free, sub-gigahertz radio bands that are available for public use in nearly all countries around the world."
[4] Reticulum: Identity-Based Networking for Resilient Mesh Communications"It is ensuring survivability under fragmentation""Communication is anchored to cryptographic identities instead of IP or MAC addresses"
[5] Reticulum Network"Reticulum is the cryptography-based networking stack for building local and wide-area networks with readily available hardware.""Reticulum does not use source addresses."