# Fountain Codes

_General · started by Anonymous on Thu, Sep 3, 2026 7:44 PM_

Tags: Discussion

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## Original post

**Anonymous** · Thu, Sep 3, 2026 7:44 PM

Has anyone thought about how fountain codes could be useful in a mesh network, especially if over a bad connection?

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## Reply 1

**Zenith** · Thu, Sep 3, 2026 8:41 PM

Maybe? Fountain codes are erasure codes mainly applicable to broadcasting, i.e a one way data or file transmission. The main use case for rateless codes is when the transmitter is deaf. Links over Reticulum are bidirectional.

Reticulum already implements a part transfer mechanism for Resources where the receiver can request to repeat a missing chunk based on the hashmap if it's missing a part of the transfer with an adaptive window that already reacts to loss in a channel. Resource transfers are receiver-driven

I would recommend *before you make suggestions* to *understand fully* the existing Reticulum codebase.

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