The vision of Reticulum is to allow anyone to operate their own sovereign communication networks, and to make it cheap and easy to cover vast areas with a myriad of independent, interconnectable and autonomous networks. Reticulum is Unstoppable Networks for The People.
Reticulum is not one network. It is a tool for building thousands of networks. Networks without kill-switches, surveillance, censorship and control. Networks that can freely interoperate, associate and disassociate with each other. Reticulum is Networks for Human Beings.
From a users perspective, Reticulum allows the creation of applications that respect and empower the autonomy and sovereignty of communities and individuals. Reticulum provides secure digital communication that cannot be subjected to outside control, manipulation or censorship.
Reticulum enables the construction of both small and potentially planetary-scale networks, without any need for hierarchical or beaureucratic structures to control or manage them, while ensuring individuals and communities full sovereignty over their own network segments.
Notable Characteristics
While Reticulum solves the same problem that any network stack does, namely to get data reliably from one point to another over a number of intermediaries, it does so in a way that is very different from other networking technologies.
To install Reticulum and related utilities on your system, the easiest way is via pip:
pip install rns
You can then start any program that uses Reticulum, or start Reticulum as a system service with the rnsd utility.
When first started, Reticulum will create a default configuration file, providing basic connectivity to other Reticulum peers that might be locally reachable. If any of those local peers are Transport Instances, these might connect you to wider networks. The default config file contains a few examples, and references for creating a more complex configuration.
For more detailed examples on how to expand communication over many mediums such as packet radio or LoRa, serial ports, or over fast IP links and the Internet using the UDP and TCP interfaces, take a look at the Supported Interfaces section of the Reticulum Manual.
Reticulum includes a range of useful utilities for managing your networks, viewing status and information, and other tasks. You can read more about these programs in the Included Utility Programs section of the Reticulum Manual.
rnsd for running Reticulum as an always-available servicernstatus, that displays information about interfacesrnpath letting you view and modify path tablesrnprobe for checking connectivity to destinationsrncp making it easy to copy files to remote systemsrnx that let's you run commands and programs and retrieve output from remote systemsAll tools, including rnx and rncp, work reliably and well even over very low-bandwidth links like LoRa or Packet Radio.
Last modified 14 December 2025