[Babel-users] Restarting MeshPoint – seeking advice on routing for crisis/disaster scenarios

[Christof Schulze]

Hello Valent,

a few folks from the Freifunk Project in Germany have been and are 
working on something similar.

Freifunk seems to have settled on Batman, however around 2019 or so I 
did a few experiements with babel. The babel setup worked well (there 
was one scaling issue found by Juliusz in the process, where babeld 
would become CPU-bound when connecting 1k clients to 50 APs and we had 
all of them roam). It might be worthwhile taking another stab at 
it using babeld.

I have not been working on seamless client roaming in an l3 network 
since then and that part of the gluon codebase is abandoned because of 
it, but the project itself might be something interesting to look at as 
many of the goals seem to align: https://github.com/freifunk-gluon/

Regards

Christof

Am Tue, Dec 16, 2025 at 12:07:13PM +0000 schrieb Valent Turkovic:
>Hi everyone,
>My name is Valent Turkovic.
>
>Between 2015 and 2018 I ran the MeshPoint project – a simple, rugged Wi-Fi hotspot designed to work in the toughest conditions.
>
>During the refugee crisis in Croatia we deployed these boxes in camps and transit centers, providing internet to humanitarian organizations (Red Cross, UNICEF, IOM, Greenpeace, and many smaller NGOs) and helping over 500,000 people stay connected. We also used them in flood response and other emergencies. The project even won “Best Humanitarian Tech of the Year” at The Europas in 2016.
>
>Unfortunately, financial issues forced me to pause the project after 2018 (I was self-funding this and burned all my savings and due to stress I had long term healt issues).
>
>Over the years I’ve stayed in touch with first responders from WFP, UNICEF, Red Cross, and various NGOs. The feedback is always the same: when disaster strikes (earthquakes, floods, or situations like in Ukraine), teams still struggle to get reliable communication up quickly. In many cases they need a simple mesh network that works in minutes, not hours or days, and runs on battery when power is out.
>
>I know that in active conflict zones Wi-Fi can be jammed (e.g., for drone control), but there are countless other scenarios—evacuation centers, field hospitals, flood-affected villages—where a fast, robust, easy-to-deploy Wi-Fi mesh makes all the difference for coordination, family contact, and medical data sharing.
>
>That’s why I’m restarting MeshPoint V2 – updated hardware with better battery life and simpler deployment, still focused on crisis response and off-grid communities.In the original MeshPoint I used Babel and was very happy with how fast and reliable it was for small-to-medium networks. But in larger, spread-out, or highly mobile setups typical for crises, I've seen scaling and resource limits that make it harder to rely on in the field.
>
>First of all – a big thank you to Juliusz and all Babel contributors. Even if you didn't know it, your work directly helped improve (and sometimes save) lives in real crisis situations.
>
>I, and all the people who stayed connected thanks to those deployments, are truly grateful.I'm curious if anyone here is working on (or aware of) approaches that try to combine:
>- Babel’s fast convergence and IP-native routing
>- BATMAN-adv-style seamless mobility
>- Better large-scale behaviour for hundreds-to-thousands of nodes in sparse or battery-constrained setups
>
>If something like that exists or is in progress, I'd love to connect and exchange ideas (or avoid reinventing the wheel).
>
>Thanks in advance!
>
>Valent Turkovic
>https://www.meshpointone.com
>
>Technical specifications (old version, for reference): https://www.meshpointone.com/technical-specifications/
>
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