Considering the amount of tech and self hosting types that live in cities, it seems like it would be popular to have little mesh intranets all over the place, but I’m not aware of any.
I read about NYC Mesh a while back, and I wonder if there are other similar things already in widespread use that I just haven’t heard about.
Meshtastic’s not really a company exactly. MeshCore exists if you don’t like it.
Semtech does IIRC have patents on and make all the LoRA chips. But the patents will expire eventually, and the LoRA chips they make are well-behaved modules that do what you tell them and not locked-down bits of nonsense that are a pain to work with. The data sheets for the modules are easy to find, and you’re not stuck messing around with firmware blobs you need to load into things. You can get boards with the Semtech radios on them from a whole bunch of manufacturers. You’d be hard-pressed to find a competing radio tech with modems available at a similar price point that we “should” be using instead.
And while the ability to use any link for e.g. Reticulum is nice, it also means that without coordination you have no idea what link you should use, and so you can never see anyone because you have no idea what technology or even what LoRA channel to look for peers on.
And Meshtastic now can go over UDP anyway.