Technology

The big problem with TCP IP is that it requires being assigned IP addresses and the border gateway protocol and other such infrastructure, which is not usable as an individual.

In Reticulum, you self-assign a destination address using your public and private keys and then announce that that service is available to the rest of the network through whatever connection you happen to have to the rest of the network.

It's not really a "you need to bypass TCP" and more of a "TCP traffic could be censored"... just like UDP, DNS, or really any other kind of networked traffic.

Reticulum isn't necessarily immune to this, it just supports a variety of protocols as a mesh network, so TCP isn't something who's failure would make the network impossible to use (but good luck accessing any traditional website without TCP).

For example, you might be able to communicate from your Android phone running a Reticulum-compatible app to a separate nearby device over Bluetooth, then that device broadcasts a signal over LoRa, which hits someone else's LoRa-compatible radio, which then connects over a USB-C cable to their laptop, which is plugged into their router, which can then send the traffic over TCP, where it's picked up by someone elsewhere using the internet. If TCP traffic is blocked, say, by their local government, maybe their LoRa radio just broadcasts to another LoRa radio, and another, and another, etc, until enough of them chained together is able to reach the recipient. Hence, TCP wouldn't strictly be required, thus preventing censorship of Reticulum through blocking TCP connections. (though this would still reduce how many ways you could theoretically get to people, as if that person ONLY has access to TCP as the start of their connection to the mesh, they'd be cut off)

Of course, the government could also try jamming radio signals, then making LoRa useless, but if they do that and don't block TCP traffic, then you still have options.

Unfortunately, I wouldn't call Reticulum an internet replacement, nor do I think it could ever be without still relying on the kind of large-scale, high-throughput infrastructure we have for the internet today. It just doesn't have enough bandwidth, and it's difficult to run anything requiring low latency if every connection requires hopping through a thousand peers to get to someone on the other side of the planet who, say, wants to play the same online game as you.

The protocol is reasonably private. Trying to find exact sources of a piece of traffic is about as hard as it can be. Reading the contents of the traffic is also at a very high bar.

The downside is, it still needs visible nodes to connect to, and the VAST majority of us only actually have access to TCP routed networks for that purpose. The only way you're talking to that reticulum node in Norway from California is because BGP is delivering your crypto stream for you.

If you have a small neighborhood and you're all like-minded, you could use reticulum over HaLow or LoRa network adapters to create a private, IP-less mesh and it could go as far as you can find more people willing to run the hardware. HaLow has enough bandwidth to stream video, LoRa is mostly only good for text. Of course, If someone is doing something like video, it won't take much to saturate everyone's connection. It's not like someone could run a Plex server and everyone could be watching it in the neighborhood at the same time; that 30MBPS can only handle a couple of decent-quality streams.