Telephony is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, being able to talk to people in far off places is kind of neat, at least in theory. On the other hand, you’re usually reliant on a centralized network, which isn’t ideal to the mindset of most hackers.[Gautam]’s MeshLive project deals with that last one, offering a decentralized mesh network solution based on Bluetooth for Android phones that can handle both voice and video.

Rather than relying on dedicated hardware, this particular mesh piggybacks on your phone, and exists only as an Android application. Calls are end-to-end encrypted for both voice and video — though two-way video calling is still experimental. More testing has gone into video broadcasting, where a stream goes out one-way. The capability is available for voice, as well.

Each user has a unique identifier that can be scanned to create contacts, but it isn’t otherwise clearly identifiable to everybody. You’ll only appear with a random name that changes every 15 minutes to other users in range who aren’t your contacts. Range is of course the Achilles heel of this project, since it’s using the Bluetooth hardware of ordinary smartphones. It’s possible to extend the range of Bluetooth significantly with the right hardware, but we imagine most folks aren’t carrying directional antennas around with them. While every phone does forward the signal to as many others as it can, it can only do so for about 20 meters.

Of course LoRa remains the protocol of choice for mesh networking, though it’s normally used for text messages only. We have seen voice packets over LoRa, but anything LoRa requires dedicated hardware while this only requires an app.