Communicate Through Disasters with the Distributed CellSol Network

In the event of a disaster, with internet and cell phone networks down, how would you contact your loved ones? There is a very good chance you don’t even have a landline in your home. The truth is that most of us today rely on precarious networks that often fail under completely normal conditions. These are almost guaranteed to be down during disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, or terrorist attacks — scenarios that have happened time and time again in the real world. Fortunately, the technology exists today to maintain communications in those circumstances. CellSol is a distributed mesh network of LoRa devices that can be used when the internet and cell service are not available.

LoRa, which simply stands for “long range,” is a relatively new wireless communications standard with an impressive transmission distance and very reasonable power requirements. Handheld LoRa devices can communicate with each other directly or with gateways to access the wider internet. While the LoRa standard has a defined transmission range of “more than 10km,” it is more realistic to achieve 1-2km. But, with mesh networks like CellSol, you don’t need to transmit far. If, for instance, the person you’re trying to contact is 25km away, you can still contact them. Your LoRa device would send the message along a chain of other LoRa devices until it reaches the desired recipient. That is the beauty of a mesh network. When all of the devices are battery-powered, the mesh network can be maintained even in the event of a natural disaster.

Each node in the CellSol network is called a “Pylon.” These can be either terminal devices that you can use a bit like a pager to send messages or repeaters that simply reinforce the mesh network. CellSol currently has two published device designs. The first is a repeater Pylon that is based on an Arduino board. The second is a terminal Pylon that can be built with an ESP32. The latter creates its own WiFi access point that you can connect to with your computer or smartphone in order to send messages. CellSol is still early in development and hasn’t yet been rolled out at any kind of scale. But the proof of concept is solid and the CellSol team has many plans to take advantage of LoRa technology. It could even be used to remotely control robots during disaster recovery operations.