How LoRa and Bluetooth Mesh Keep Communities Connected When the Grid Goes Down
Tariq Vance · · 7 min read
During natural disasters or regional power outages, cellular base stations quickly deplete battery backups and fail. Centralized chat applications become useless when servers are unreachable.
Orchard integrates peer-to-peer mesh protocols directly into everyday communication. Using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for close-proximity hops and portable Long Range (LoRa) packet radio transceivers, messages hop securely from device to device across miles without cell towers or ISPs.
Every packet is cryptographically protected with Signal Protocol-grade Double Ratchet encryption (secp256k1 identity keys). No phone numbers, no email addresses, and no central logs—just resilient peer-to-peer privacy.