[LoSboccacc]

the solution for routing voip on a mesh network wasn't obvious.

data? yeah, albeit p2p sharing was popularized a year late, aggregating multiple channels for data transfer was something common.

but voip has some unique challenges, as you cannot reconstruct data as easily, you have strict time constraint as your call would exhibit disruptive latency otherwise, so your mesh cannot pump packet downstream at their own leisure, the goal is not to saturate the channel but to provide a ordered stream whee packets arrive in a timely matter.

as a matter of fact the first consumer available p2p voip app was skype, 5 years or so after this patent, and they couldn't stabilize it with a true mesh so their software elected supernodes across their own network to act as relay.