Taiwan’s Meshtastic mesh grows to 20,000 amid internet outages

When Taiwan’s internet wobbles, Meshtastic is no longer just a hobby demo. More than 20,000 people have formed a mesh for communication during widespread disruptions, and the scale now looks like a real backup layer, not a weekend experiment.

The Taiwan Meshtastic Community, founded on February 26, 2024 as the Facebook group Meshtastic Taiwan Community , grew from about 50 members at launch to nearly 20,000, according to Rti. The group now has an estimated 1,000-plus devices operating across Taiwan, with coverage reported at about 80% of the island and active nodes in Taipei, Taichung, Kaohsiung and Hualien. Engineers, amateur radio operators and communication professionals have joined the buildout, giving the network a very different profile from a casual maker project.

That matters because Meshtastic has hard technical limits that separate a functioning mesh from a pile of radios. The platform is an open-source, off-grid system built on low-power LoRa radios, and users connect a phone or computer to a radio by Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or USB to send short messages without internet or cell service. Meshtastic’s own documentation says nodes must share the same LoRa spreading factor, center frequency and bandwidth to join one mesh, which means scale depends on disciplined configuration as much as on raw device count. In practice, density and radio setup appear to be doing the heavy lifting in Taiwan.

The island’s connectivity problems explain the appeal. Taiwan activated backup communications for Dongyin in April after an undersea cable break, and the outage affected roughly 1,500 residents in Dongyin Township before voice and internet were shifted to microwave transmission. Undersea cable incidents have repeatedly disrupted Taiwan’s outlying islands, while Typhoon Danas caused more than NT$200 million in telecom infrastructure damage in southern Taiwan in 2025, including damage to base stations and fiber-optic lines. Chunghwa Telecom said 33 damaged base stations needed full repair.

For Meshtastic operators, Taiwan is the proof case many have been waiting for. A mesh with 20,000 people behind it, 1,000-plus devices in the field and coverage across most of the island shows what becomes possible when a hobby network is built with the same seriousness as the outages it is meant to survive.