The original product makes more sense since it's more likely that people who are hiking or whatever circumstances have them off of a cellular network will bring their devices. There's never going to be enough critical mass for someone to depend on this as something active in their area.
We are working in real-time to get this issue fixed, which was the opposite of our intention. I'm really sorry this happened.
Anyway, we like both products! Our award-winning v1 device gets great point to point range; this new one will do that plus offer the opportunity to relay messages via mesh in certain situations. And we can finally address demand internationally (Mesh can ship to 49 countries bc we're going through regulatory process in other regions).
And finally I guess I'd say that meshing is useful even among just 3 people who know each other. It has blue-sky possibilities that are really game-changing if adopted widely. I'm betting on both ;-)
What that meant for us is we decided to focus specifically on burst data. As a result our hardware can be lighter/smaller/less expensive and our networking protocols can scale to do things that other mesh projects have failed at.
For goTenna/goTenna Mesh, not doing real-time high-bandwidth media transmissions is a feature not a bug. Plus, focusing on packetized burst data transmissions doesn't preclude us from even sending a whole Netflix show over goTenna if we wanted to, because you could technically send a video over in lots of small packets and reconstruct it at the other end. Everything, after all, are 1's and 0's. (BTW with our SDK you can do that if you'd like! We're still gonna be focused on text & GPS in our own apps for now - for both goTenna v1 and goTenna Mesh).
Because we didn't have the choice of working on beautiful licensed spectrum used by limited users and less subject to regulations by government. We always had to by definition design goTenna (and now goTenna Mesh) to work on public spectrum which is a scarce and shared resource with potentially unlimited users and regulations that we have to fit into.
TL;DR: Focusing on burst data has been a really great way of scaling our technology from the first intelligent protocols that power v1 (which we call Aspen Prime) and goTenna Mesh (Aspen Grove).
Also perseverance. And naivete probably helped too because it's easier to get into something difficult when you have no clue how hard it's gonna be. We've learned a lot along the way since our first working prototypes in early 2013.
(Sorry if I sound barely coherent right now; I haven't slept in a few days leading up to goTenna Mesh launch!)
The TL;DR of it is: How do we build infrastructure-free infrastructure? It starts small but we have, I think, Big Ideas ;-)
I assume you're not going to give your original Kickstarter backers any discount even though we endured months and months of delays and broken delivery promises?
