Global Beacon Network & Multi-Media Connectivity Crossroads
Litehaus is evolving from a distributed beacon network into a universal connectivity hub: a meeting point for fibre internet, WebSocket telemetry, LoRaWAN, WiFi HaLow, SDR radio, precision timing, and future entropy-backed secure communications across a geographically distributed infrastructure.
Litehaus began as a globally distributed network of lighthouse beacon servers broadcasting real-time performance data over WebSocket. It is now being expanded into a cross-domain experimentation platform designed to bridge multiple communication media into a single coherent system.
High-performance C++ backends using SimdJSON still provide the core live beacon streams, but the broader mission is bigger: resilient interconnection between internet-native services, long-range radio, local mesh, precision time sources, and cryptographically strong communications infrastructure.
Litehaus currently spans four public global lighthouse nodes, with Mars serving as the Wales, UK home node and local integration hub for the next phase of cross-media expansion.
Each Litehaus node runs a beacon service that continuously broadcasts JSON packets containing performance metrics such as parse time, throughput, uptime, listener count, and optimization level.
This gives you a live, distributed telemetry layer today, while also laying the groundwork for richer routing and media-bridging roles as new hardware is brought online.
A forthcoming rubidium GPSDO will turn Mars into a precision timing anchor for the wider Litehaus network. The design goal is UTC-disciplined operation using a stable 10 MHz reference and 1PPS timing so that distributed measurements, event ordering, and cross-node correlation all become materially more trustworthy.
When GPS lock is healthy and the timing chain is properly calibrated, Litehaus is intended to operate in a sub-microsecond-class synchronisation regime for reference timing across the network. Exact realised accuracy will still depend on antenna placement, sky view, cable delay, receiver lock quality, and the timestamping path used at each node.
In practical terms, that means Litehaus is being built not merely as a set of servers, but as a globally-aware, time-disciplined instrumentation fabric.
One of the most important expansion steps is the addition of an 8-channel LoRaWAN gateway at the home node. This creates a powerful bridge between long-range low-power radio traffic and the global fibre-backed IP network.
In effect, LoRa packets received locally can be forwarded into the wider Litehaus internet backbone, carried across oceans through standard IP infrastructure, and handled by remote services or applications elsewhere in the network. This gives Litehaus the character of a genuine crossroads: radio entering from the air, traversing fibre at internet scale, and emerging inside a globally distributed telemetry and control environment.
The result is not just local RF coverage, but the beginning of a transatlantic and eventually transcontinental radio-to-IP-to-service fabric.
Litehaus is also being developed as a source of physically-derived entropy. A planned camera system observing lava lamps at the home node will act as a miniature entropy source in the spirit of the classic Cloudflare wall, providing chaotic visual input that can be processed into high-quality randomness for cryptographic use.
That entropy stream is intended to feed secure key material generation, session encoding, and other cryptographically sensitive operations spanning the Litehaus network. The objective is to let the network not only move data between media, but also help secure it using entropy born from real-world physical processes.
Additional future media inputs may include ambient or structured audio capture, allowing Litehaus to evolve toward a broader multi-sensor connectivity and trust platform rather than remaining purely an internet service.
Connect to any lighthouse beacon via WebSocket:
wss://nyc.litehaus.online/ws
wss://lon.litehaus.online/ws
wss://syd.litehaus.online/ws
wss://sgp.litehaus.online/ws
wss://mars.litehaus.online/wsconst ws = new WebSocket('wss://mars.litehaus.online/ws');
ws.onopen = () => {
console.log('Connected to Mars home node');
};
ws.onmessage = (event) => {
const beacon = JSON.parse(event.data);
console.log('Beacon:', beacon);
};
ws.onclose = () => {
console.log('Disconnected');
};npm install -g wscat
wscat -c wss://mars.litehaus.online/wsEach beacon broadcasts JSON packets similar to:
{
"lighthouse_id": "mars-home-node-001",
"location": "Wales, UK",
"json_parse_time_microseconds": 0.847,
"average_throughput_mbps": 1180.5,
"system_uptime_hours": 142.7,
"total_beacons_broadcast": 51283,
"connected_global_listeners": 12,
"cpu_optimization_level": "AVX2",
"timestamp": 1735012345678
}Beacon content will continue to evolve as Litehaus grows beyond pure WebSocket telemetry into a broader, time-aware, radio-aware, and entropy-aware connectivity fabric.
Litehaus works alongside fastping.it.com for HTTP-based latency testing. While Litehaus provides continuous WebSocket beacon streams, Fastping offers on-demand ping/pong responses for measuring round-trip latency and cross-checking network behaviour.
curl -X POST https://fastping.it.com/ping \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"timestamp": 1735012345678}'Together, they form complementary layers: continuous distributed observation from Litehaus and ad-hoc latency probing from Fastping.