not really, the reason why Wifi is useful is that its reasonably efficient and high bandwidth. Unless you need to cover hectares of land without any buildings, its easier just to use decent wifi (ie unfi)
Mesh networking with multi-path is really hard to tune for bandwidth efficiency, throughput and power efficiency at the same time
HN has a lot of us that have ~0 idea what you'd use this for, even when we steelman, all we can do is vaguely handwave about easier to setup wireless internet on a vast compound we own.
Would be really cool if someone could hop in and just give a couple one off examples, i guess? Only other one handwave I can think of is IOT x assembly line stuff for businesses, but I'm real curious why individuals are so into it -- or maybe they're not, and that's why the codebase quality is so poor? Idk.
In the end: LoRa is only good for very short text messages at somewhat long distance (up to 10km without special setup) and without bad conditions (obstacles on line of sight, rain/fog). There is an ongoing fight between each of the two frequencies to be used as default and this publication adds another frequency into the battle.
There is WiFi HaLow, a relatively new WiFi protocol which seems to solve the low bandwidth issues with LoRa on relatively confortable distance (likely up to 8km, same as with LoRa in regards to Line of Sight), albeit slightly less affected by weather conditions. The advantage here is permitting to send images and binary data in general, but think about something being sent at the speed levels from 2005 (which in any case is good speed for most usable things).
Then there are other relevant mesh protocols yet to mention here like ESPnow which is my personal favorite. Whereas the other two options above are exotic and with transceivers around the 50 EUR and above. With ESPnow you just need any cheap ESP32 embedded device with an optional antenna to increase range for about 3 EUR (antenna included). With that you get similar returns to WiFi HaLow with less range (about 3 kilometers max on my experiments) but cheap like heck.
To setup internet on a vast compound, WiFi HaLow might be a good investment. If you are with a constrained budget, then ESP32 is your friend. To remember, long distance is limited so if you are considering more than 8 devices exchanging heavy data, you should just go for proper WiFi long range transmitters.
- emergency communication
- low power data transfer for sensors
- low data rate data transfer for mobile groups. Air softers use it to transmit information to each other while playing.
HaLow:
- "high" data rate over shorter range, though much higher range than 2.4 wifi - data sharing between mobile groups like above, but high enough bandwidth for low quality video
- large area wifi deployments