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AREDN®, as we’ve come to know it, is 11 years old. In that time it has come a long way, supporting a wide variety of devices, a host of radio bands, and has been deployed across the world. The UI has evolved, tunnels have been added, bandwidth and throughput have increased, and more features and services can be supported. The one constant in all this has been how AREDN® manages the network, using a protocol called Optimized Link State Routing – OLSR. Unfortunately as networks have grown, this protocol has buckled, and sometimes broken, under the strain, as OLSR was never designed for the size or variety of the networks we have. This year we added a new modern network protocol – Babel (see the How-To in the online documentation for more information). The goal has been to replace OLSR after a period of testing and migration, and we imagined it might take years to successfully transition from one protocol to the other. Instead, we have been blown away by how our community has embraced and requested this change. As of this writing, almost 80% of nodes worldwide are running firmware which uses the Babel protocol.
With this in mind, we have decided to move more quickly with our Babel transition. 2025 will be the last year we release AREDN® code which contains OLSR; 2026 will be the year we only speak Babel.
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