Lately (last few years) user-friendly mesh networks have started to become a thing.
As a radio amateur I am heavily in favour. Both Meshtastic and Meshcore allow people to easily set up a quick little mesh for their friends or large city/region spanning networks. It's frankly a bit impressive how much can be accomplished using low power (0,5W) on highly congested frequency bands. But quite frankly I think this kind of radio experimentation falls squarely within the domain of amateur radio and it would be nice to be able to use bands where we have primary status and higher power limits. And in order to use amateur radio bands you need to not encrypt your transmissions.
MT/C are therefore a bit inconvenient for this. This is because they're encrypted by default and disabling encryption is cumbersome/impossible. You can use "default passwords", but while that works to some extent, it's not a solution I'm happy with.
What I would like is a protocol where every message is in cleartext, but signed.
I'm not saying that signing should necessarily be mandatory, but it would be nice to have. Benefits include:
There are however some downsides:
Some readers might have been shouting at the monitor "But why not just use APRS!?", well I don't have a good
answer so I'll quote a past Prime Minister:
No, don't wanna.
In conclusion: I think it would be nice if meshes were open. If you agree/disagree, have comments, et cetera, please let me know.