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Peer-to-Peer Cellular

Posted by michael on from the RIAA-already-alerted dept.

Phos writes: "A cool article over at the O'Reilly Network outlines a possible solution to cellular network outages in the event of an emergency. A P2P SMS technique where individual handsets act as autonomous SMS relays."

1 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Disadvantages by sting3r · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It's sad to see that the author didn't touch on any of the possible downsides to his approach:

    • It's expensive. Redesigning SMS, asking the FCC for more spectrum, and fine-tuning the new protocol isn't cheap. And the wireless providers (many of whom have never run in the black) don't have much of an incentive to support anything PTP. Especially because catastrophic network failures are very rare.
    • Cheating. Most providers charge for SMS. How do they know that people won't try to beat the system and get SMS services for free?
    • Security. Unless somebody develops public key infrastructure for mobile phones, messages will be vulnerable to interception and malicious alteration. And that's probably the last thing emergency workers need to deal with.
    • Battery life. Ordinarily, PCS phones are only transmitting and receiving every 2-5 seconds, and they are communicating with a relatively powerful base station. This sort of thing would kill battery life. Unless all of the phone makers start using fuel cells, this is a grave concern.

    -sting3r