That sounds cool. Although it's not exactly what I was talking about. In my ideal scenario phones would communicate directly with each other without having to rely on a third party server.
Slightly problematic when your phone loses service, but I get where you are coming from. It would be nice for that to be viable, we’re probably decades away from having good enough network connectivity.
Not really. We need a way to create ad-hoc phone-to-phone physical networks, not virtual ones that still go through the Internet. Though even just going through LAN would be an improvement. Bluetooth could technically do this, but as it is, it seems to suck.
I get your point but the phone companies wouldn't be able to survive, and when I talk to people on wifi it's never as good as a phone call. They must be using dedicated routing or something, even though I think we are past the world of direct circuits.
Is there really no alternative to using an ISP for a connection?
Is it possible to build a decentralised and encrypted network on our mobile phones? I guess we still have to run traffic through mobile service providers...
The most interesting idea there is the "third cloud" - that our phones might share information with each other automatically.
I've often wished that, as I sit just out of signal inside a building, that my phone could talk to one nearer the window and use its signal to connect to the outside world.
But this then raises all sorts of questions, both security related (man-in-the-middle attacks) and business related (how do I pay for using their bandwidth).
I imagine a world where you just a bring a phone anywhere and it you open your network settings, go to your cellular data menu, and then automatically it detects the mobile network providers that support the towers it can see.
Then you tap on the one you want, select the package you want, pay for it from that menu and then bam you are connected.
All without having an existing Wi-Fi or Cellular data plan.
There needs to be some basic/back-end service that allows for this type of communication to people not already subscribed to a mobile network.
I'm actually more interested in the possibility to used such phones as a mobile internet access point. The Nokia I'm using can connect by WLAN or USB to my laptop, which is great.
How would you arrange it practically though? You would have to distribute sim cards, and people would have to swap those out with their normal sim card rendering them unreachable by phone. That's ofcourse assuming their phone isn't carrier-locked. Wifi seems a lot more practical unless phones are redesigned to cover this usage pattern.
Oh, and a pocket voip p2p wifi mesh phone would be nice.
Though the latency might be crap over too many hops and I am not entirely sure how well it would fare in really huge city-wide networks of the things. :)
Maybe if his phones could act as modems, he'd have unlimited (but slow?) data - leave one on back home with a dialin server, and dial into that from the other one :)
This is about to get a lot more complicated. Given that more and more people have access to internet on their phones, it'd be quite easy for someone to temporary tether to their phone to access whatever they want
So they’re proposing to use WiFi to connect to other phones, right? And the only way to exchange data from me (pointA) to somewhere else (pointB) is to have a chain of phone users connecting my location to pointB. And how close would each connection need to be? It’s not like cellphones have antennae the size of cellular towers. So stupid.
And assuming this could magically work, do you need to build an entire new phone? Or can it just be a software problem? That way you could defer to cellular network in cases where this would inevitably fail.
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