To be as widely usable and efficient to deploy as possible, the following goals have been used to guide the design of Reticulum:

Fully useable as open source software stack

Reticulum must be implemented with, and be able to run using only open source software. This is critical to ensuring the availability, security and transparency of the system.

Hardware layer agnosticism

Reticulum must be fully hardware agnostic, and shall be useable over a wide range of physical networking layers, such as data radios, serial lines, modems, handheld transceivers, wired ethernet, wifi, or anything else that can carry a digital data stream. Hardware made for dedicated Reticulum use shall be as cheap as possible and use off-the-shelf components, so it can be easily modified and replicated by anyone interested in doing so.

Very low bandwidth requirements

Reticulum should be able to function reliably over links with a transmission capacity as low as 500 bits per second.

Encryption by default

Reticulum must use strong encryption by default for all communication.

Initiator Anonymity

It must be possible to communicate over a Reticulum network without revealing any identifying information about oneself.

Unlicensed use

Reticulum shall be functional over physical communication mediums that do not require any form of license to use. Reticulum must be designed in a way, so it is usable over ISM radio frequency bands, and can provide functional long distance links in such conditions, for example by connecting a modem to a PMR or CB radio, or by using LoRa or WiFi modules.

Supplied software

In addition to the core networking stack and API, that allows a developer to build applications with Reticulum, a basic set of Reticulum-based communication tools must be implemented and released along with Reticulum itself. These shall serve both as a functional, basic communication suite, and as an example and learning resource to others wishing to build applications with Reticulum.

Ease of use

The reference implementation of Reticulum is written in Python, to make it easy to use and understand. A programmer with only basic experience should be able to use Reticulum to write networked applications.

Low cost

It shall be as cheap as possible to deploy a communication system based on Reticulum. This should be achieved by using cheap off-the-shelf hardware that potential users might already own. The cost of setting up a functioning node should be less than $100 even if all parts needs to be purchased.

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