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History

Réseau Libre and the Montreal mesh has a rich history.

The Internet era (1970-2010)

In another millennia, the Internet was founded as a decentralized military/university network called ARPANET, between 1969 and 1980, on top of which was developed the World Wide Web (1993), on which you are likely reading this text.

At first hindered then co-opted by large telephone companies, the network struggled to stay decentralized and horizontal. Access, which was first free — provided you paid your phone company — became its own commodity, and has rarely decreased in price ever since.

In Québec, universities and CÉGEPS were the first to offer internet access, alongside a hodgepodge crew of small independent providers. The RISQ network was founded in 1989 and still exists to this day, but almost every other challenger to the large telecommunication companies (Bell, Québecor, Rogers, and Telus) have all been absorbed by one of the incumbents.

So apart from a privileged few with data center access or knowledge of the dark arts, the Internet never really materialized its decentralized nature for the commoner. In the year of the dragon (2000), hopes were high but then the towers fell and a veil of darkness slowly fell over the world.

We consider this as part of the history of "the Montréal mesh", because there was the belief that this Internet could become something else than classic broadcasting.1

As it turns out, telecommunication companies were far from the worst we would see.

The WiFi era (2010-2020)

In 2011, while Facebook was preparing its IPO, the Occupy movement was taking the world by storm while some hackers in Montréal and elsewhere were experimenting with WiFi mesh networks.

There were already well-established community networks then, Île sans fil (ISF, Montréal, 2003), Freifunk (Berlin, 2003) and Guifi.net (Catalonia, 2004), for example, but no "mesh" network in Montréal proper, ISF having abandoned the mesh idea to focus on on-premise hot spots.

In 2012, the Réseau Libre name was picked and the informal organization was founded by people from ISF, Koumbit, Foulab, FACIL and others.

At that point, the goal was not to give internet access but to create an alternative network, with local services. But by then the "printemps érable" was in full swing and people were organizing over the newer, commercial social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Réseau Libre nevertheless persevered in researching WiFi mesh technologies: first with OLSR and BATMAN, then converging over Babel.

Unfortunately, reaching critical mass seemed impossible: WiFi was fundamentally hard to deploy because of high power usage and limited range. The lack of a clear application, especially when people were so massively transitioning to centralized infrastructure like Amazon, Google and Facebook, was also found to be demotivating for some.

Worries about surveillance were also a concern: in 2013, the Snowden revelations showed how much power the state had developed over the Internet. At that point, TLS was not as pervasive as it has become, Let's Encrypt disrupting the Certificate Authority only from 2014.

At its peak, the Réseau Libre WiFi network had somewhere between 20 and 60 relays, mostly disconnected, with the biggest pocket in Pointe-Saint-Charles of about half a dozen relays.

After about 6 years of effort, the project slowly died down. The last meetings were held in 2015 while discussions on the mailing list trickled down to a halt in 2018.

The LoRa era (2020-?)

Meanwhile a new technology, LoRa, enters the picture, around 2015. But it's not until 2020 that more accessible software, namely Meshtastic emerges in public view, and then also Reticulum (2018) and MeshCore (2024).

Folks in Foulab — who had never stopped running a mesh — start hosting a "mesh night" in 2024 at which point there are already dozens of cities with Meshtastic groups. More nodes come up in the summer of 2025 at which point there are hardly a dozen nodes over the entire city, without significant coverage.

Unbeknownst to the Montreal folks, the Ottawa Mesh is also working towards their own Meshtastic/Meshcore mesh, with a presence of about 50 Meshcore repeaters.

Shortly after, the Montreal network grows organically and starts to gain critical mass, with about 60 to 100 relays in the spring of 2026, at which point https://lora.reseaulibre.ca is brought online (in February 2026) and added to the Meshtastic local groups list.

In spring 2026, there are 150 Meshcore repeaters in Ottawa, thousands on the US west coast, about 20,000 Meshcore repeaters worldwide, and roughly the same number of Meshtastic MQTT relays, although those numbers should all be taken with a grain of salt.

Our challenge is communication reliability and crossing the mythical mountain, an old Réseau Libre dream that now finally seems attainable.

Meanwhile, there are 3 billion monthly active users on Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram (all owned by Meta), 2.5B on YouTube (owned by Google), 2B on TikTok. Surveillance, hate speech, fake content, and censorship are pervasive on all those platforms. The internet is ripping at the seams, we are reaching peak oil, war is ever present, and the challenges are tremendous.

But what is sure is that 2026 brings a lot of momentum, and the future is unwritten. What was left as a dead experiment has been revived, and we will always have hope.

— anarcat, 2026-03-25

  1. Apologies to radio operators and enthusiasts: obviously, the history of (mesh) communications goes further back than the invention of the Internet, but one has to start somewhere, and that probably requires going back to the nineteenth century and James Maxwell. ↩