speed will increase as development continues

LoRa is already surfing on the bleeding edge of physics. There is no way to get anything more out of it, other than allocating wider EM spectrum for this usecase.

There are some radio amateurs in my area trying Meshcore on 169Mhz for example. There are also some new boards available that can do LoRa on 2.4Ghz, but both approaches have some downsides as well.

For a more stable and reliable network, we would also need radios capable of communicating on multiple channels simultaneously (remember, the whole thing started off as a reaction to really cheap, almost disposable dev boards), but now we’re approaching the complexity and requirements of the traditional mobile networks.

People who studied the code speak really fondly about reticulum, however, it’s not as popular for building the lora based mesh networks, because the full stack does not run on the simple microcontroller. You need what is basically a standard PC connected to it. Given that mesh repeaters are usually designed to run off-grid on solar and battery, wasting additional power for a raspberry pi or similar computer would make the project unfeasible.

All while Meshtastic or Meshcore are perfectly happy with the esp32 or nrf microcontrollers. And the nrf ones can run without a direct sunshine for days with the reasonably large battery.