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).
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.
I assume these things would then be connected by some sort of hyperlocal area network (personal area network? PAN?) around you, with one cellular hub to be connecting them to the cloud?
This is pretty cool, it seems a lot of developments in the wireless world has approached things from a macro level (whole networks) but what about the micro (a room full of cellphones)?
I.E. my cellphone can connect me to all sorts of things out there in the "cloud' but what about what's in front of me?
I like the idea of LiFi communications. Might be hard for devices to upload data, but beaming stuff from your light bulbs down to your devices might be a very high bandwidth possibility.
My imagination is getting ahead of me, but you could potentially have lightbulbs+LIDAR in your roof, to track occupants and things.
I really like the "cell phone that connects to multiple networks" idea. Not just for the ability to make the cheapest call, but for the ability to make a call from anywhere that has reception from any provider.
I wonder if that could pave the way for boutique carriers that provide connectivity in hard-to-reach spots (say, the bottom story of a parking garage). The building owner could potentially take a cut on the phone fees the same way that building owners extract a fee from ATMs on their property.
This is of course just my opinion but we’re moving towards a high speed interconnected world- 5G, (6G?), peer to peer internet, starlink (eh?), etc.
One idea I’ve been playing around with quite a bit lately has been offloading computational data and even OS- obviously I’m not the first one on this, but I think at one point just turning our phones in to input/ receivers for some sort of cloud based OS- where basically all our phones have are an input module, battery, a strong receiver, and a storage for caching.
Then you could start making super light hardware- computers, tablets, phones all accessing on singular OS that just reformats depending on the device.
And we wouldn’t need to upgrade our personal hardware anymore we could just upgrade the racks.
Once everything is interconnected we wouldn’t even need cell plans either, we could just communicate through the existing cloud devices.
This is a very good idea, I tried it some time ago but was too early. There are people working on this privately. You do mean phones connected in a data center don't you?
I have an idea for The Other Half: an Xbee 802.15.4 module that could facilitate a distributed telecommunications network between mobile handsets. I have my eye on David Rowe's open source codec2 to support voice calls because it can achieve telephone quality at 1400 bits-per-second, and I think that at this bandwidth multiple calls can be relayed efficiently, (and _securely_), though a mesh network. If a handset has WiFi access then calls can then route through the internet and path around the world. If we want to continue to use the antiquated practice of telephone numbers as identifiers, then we can use cryptographic primatives and a blockchain, (like bitcoin), to prove telephone number-handset authenticity on the new peer-to-peer network.
Combine this with a Jolla phone for a connection to a conventional cellular network and perhaps a handset could move seamlessly through peer-to-peer calling, handset-to-VoIP calling, and the PTSN.
Then the day may come where we can finally do away with these telecommunications companies, and have a decentralized and secure-by-design phone system once and for all.
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.
(the mobile phone could talk to the cloud but a year is still expensive)
i wonder how quickly you could solve that problem, cracking the wpa2 key, if you had $$$ resources to scale up. could it be usable? would make for a great android app :) i'd buy it!
Why can't we build distributed networks? I more mean like Google, Apple, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, etc building methods to communicate through WiFi/Bluetooth and not be completely reliant upon cellular. I don't mean your random 3rd party app that is useless because no one uses it.
It helps the people that frequently text in the same room. It helps during natural disasters (including power outages). It helps prevent oppressive governments from shutting down communication. I see these companies talk a lot about promoting democracy, so I want to see them make an open protocol that is installed on all phones that allow this. They have the network effect that's required to do this.
Hell, I think even if Apple or Google just did this others would follow. It cleanly fits into the new privacy + safety narratives both are selling.
It is interesting, but I think it is a dead end. The concept is possible because GSM doesn't require mutual authentication. Consequently, devices can "relatively" easily attach to a tower, if a bunch of circumstances are true.
Umts requires mutual authentication, so any devices that will connect must be preconfigured to do so. This means that attaching to your own tower becomes a lot less simple: each device must be configured to work with your own cloud.
I think it is a dead end because gsm will be phased out eventually. This is only "easy" today because many phones are dual stacked gsm/umts.
OpenBTS really started some interesting work in this space, but I think openBSC is the more advanced (and less approachable) soloution. OpenBSC recently reported some small ability to support a little bit of GPRS. Without GPRS support, there is no ability to do data on your phoney tower. Unfortunately, the hardware on openBSC is less accessible.
Here's another idea: TCP over vibration. Put one phone on top of the other, the bottom one in vibration mode, the other using its accelerometer to receive.
I imagine the implementation could look similar to how cell phones can use other carriers networks (for 911) when they don't have signal from their own carrier.
We need to focus more on mesh wifi networking. If Our phones could connect directly (and they can) using wifi in a mesh, it would be quite easy to write network clients to share data with them.
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).
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