OpenMANET Runs Video Over Wi-Fi HaLow Mesh Networks

Off-grid mesh networking has had a clear ceiling for years. Meshtastic and its LoRa cousins are superb at moving text and sensor readings across kilometres on almost no power, but ask them to carry a voice channel or a camera feed and the physics runs out. OpenMANET, covered by CNX Software on September 16, 2026, takes the opposite bet: spend more power and more silicon, and get a real IP network in return.

• OpenMANET delivers 1 to 15 Mbps over 802.11ah Wi-Fi HaLow, depending on the regulatory domain you operate in
• Firmware is based on OpenWrt 24.10 with Linux kernel 6.6.138, using 802.11s mesh and batman-adv routing, released under GPL-3.0
• Supports Raspberry Pi 4, CM4, 3B and Zero 2 W, plus HaLowLink 2, Heltec HT-HD01-V2 and Gateworks Venice boards
• Carries push-to-talk voice, RTSP video streaming, full IP networking and ATAK integration over multicast

What Is a MANET, and Why Build One on Wi-Fi HaLow?

A mobile ad-hoc network is a mesh with no infrastructure: every node routes for every other node, and the topology reshapes itself as people move. That is exactly what you want for search and rescue, disaster response, or a field exercise where there is no tower to connect to and nobody to call if there were.

The interesting engineering choice is the radio. Wi-Fi HaLow — 802.11ah — runs in sub-GHz spectrum, which buys penetration and range that 2.4 GHz cannot match, while still being Wi-Fi underneath. That means standard IP semantics rather than a bespoke packet format. OpenMANET pairs Morse Micro HaLow silicon with the 802.11s mesh standard and batman-adv for layer-2 routing, so the mesh looks like an ordinary bridged network to everything above it.

The practical consequence is that any application that speaks IP just works. That is a genuinely different proposition from a LoRa mesh, where every capability has to be built into the protocol itself. We walked through that trade-off in detail in our Meshtastic, MeshCore and LoRaWAN explainer.

How Fast Is It Really?

One to 15 Mbps is a wide band, and the spread is regulatory rather than technical — sub-GHz channel widths and duty-cycle rules differ sharply by country, so the same hardware behaves differently in different places. At the top of that range you have comfortable headroom for an RTSP video stream; at the bottom you have enough for voice and telemetry.

Compare that to a LoRa mesh measured in kilobits and the gap is three orders of magnitude. The cost is honest and stated plainly: OpenMANET needs more powerful, more power-hungry and more expensive hardware than a coin-cell Meshtastic node. A Raspberry Pi 4 is not something you leave on a hilltop for a month.

Which Hardware Should You Start With?

The project supports a broad hardware list — Gateworks Venice, Raspberry Pi 4, CM4, 3B and Zero 2 W, HaLowLink 2, and the Heltec HT-HD01-V2 — but CNX Software notes that a Raspberry Pi 4 kit is the recommended starting point, because it is the configuration that supports the full feature set at once: the core network, off-grid comms, camera support, BLOS for securely merging two separate MANETs over the internet, and the new user interface.

On the radio side the firmware repository lists modules including the Wio-WM6108, Silex SX-SDMAH, Alfa AHPI6108E and Gateworks GW16167 and GW16170, with the GW16170 offering the highest transmit power on the list at 28.5 dBm. If you have been following the HaLow ecosystem, this arrives right after Morse Micro's HaLow USB adapters made the radios trivially attachable to any PC or router — the two stories together mean the barrier to experimenting with sub-GHz mesh just dropped substantially. More boards and builds are on our mini computers page.

Fully Open, Including the Voice Module

The firmware is GPL-3.0 and built on OpenWrt 24.10, with a Go daemon called openmanetd handling mesh management and exposing both a web interface and an API. The Open Voice Link Module hardware sits under the CERN Open Hardware Licence v2, and the project maintains separate repositories for documentation, enclosures, packages and protobuf definitions. The firmware repo shows 315 commits on the 24.10 branch with active issues and pull requests — a live project, not an archive.

For anyone who has wanted a mesh that carries a camera instead of a character count, this is the first credible open answer.

Sources: CNX Software — September 16, 2026; OpenMANET firmware repository on GitHub — accessed September 16, 2026.