Slashdot Mirror
Peer-to-Peer Cell Phones?
Mike writes "This Wired article mentions that research firm SRI International has come up with a nifty way to lessen the need for the ugly cell towers that you see popping up everywhere (I love the ones here in Atlanta that are oh-so-cleverly dressed up to look like pine trees). Their PacketHop software would create a sort of peer-to-peer network, utilizing the unused power in phones in the vicinity as miniature relays, with your voice/data hopping from one phone to the next until it reaches a relay tower and its final destination."
Let me just say that these people would have to provide some pretty serious security credentials before I'd let my calls hop along other people's phones. Maybe they could PGP each person's phone. That'd be cool.
This tagline is umop apisdn.
will be great fun once the packet-sniffers are available...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
My cell phone battery goes dead soon enough without transmitting data for other people.
If your phone happened to be a popular hop, it seems like it'd suck your batteries right down.
No thanks.
If the number of cell towers were reduced and relied on proximity to other cell phones for a signal, would'nt that reduce the likleyhood of someone getting a connection in someplace like a national park or the Mojave Desert? People away from people need to talk to other people too!
What would this kind of technology do to my standby battery life?
Life is like pants... fit in or you don't fit in.
Yeah, it's possible. Of course, it'd mean your cell phone's battery would run down within a matter of hours as it relayed other people's conversations around. I'd guess a lot of people would "hack" their phones to not act as relays, so as to conserve battery life. The result would be a breakdown of the network.
The multiple relay idea isn't such a bad idea, though, if you move the relays out of the phones and onto the power grid. How 'bout if everyone who got a phone also plugged in a base station at their house? That piece of hardware would do the relaying instead. Then battery life wouldn't be a problem. Offer a few people free service if there are dead spots in the neighborhood.
Add on another feature; plug the relay into your phone line, and when you're at home or near it, your cell phone becomes a cordless phone (like in L. Neil Smith's book Hope .
This means that people can drive like idiots, totally ignoring the road and other cars in front of them further away from those ugly base station towers!
I feel safer already!
Duris MUD - The best pkill MUD. Ever.
Very much like the peer-to-peer communication used by nanites in Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age".
"We were half way to Rivendell when the drugs began to take hold."
-- Hunter S. Tolkien
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of these! Seems like everything is going P2P these days. What's next, P2P refrigerators ?
reenigne
1. The Obvious: "owning" another cell phone.
2. Radiation becomes a REAL risk, because the main broadcasting would be done by the phones, not the towers.
3. Battery life (ok, not so much a danger as a nuisance).
4. Spam (another nuisance).
5. Viruses.
I think I'll stick with my plain cell phone for now.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
Damn, they beat me to it. But, as several others have pointed out, I'd be surprised if this will go to far. It wouldn't take much to hack a phone and be able to pick up the traffic being routed through it.
OTOH, what are the odds that the owner of the cell phone your traffic is routed through even cares about your conversation?
"I turn away with fright and horror from the lamentable evil of functions which do not have derivatives."
but if you used cingular, could your hop conduct through att wireless phones, or even better, would one of the companies program them to use up their competitors' phones first?
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
A system like that's gotta be able to reconfigure itself instantly, at "packet speed;" say I'm carrying some guy's packets and I drive into a tunnel... sorta like Gnutella on crack. Good stuff.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
Seriously! Couldn't some evil cracker crack the network and use it to create wireless broadband for himself? Or even worse: A spam fest where the guy hacks the phones and they all call numbers.
The best part is that people could use Internet enabled phones to create DoS attacks. Great idea, a disaster waiting to happen.
Slashdot is a waste of time. I enjoy wasting time.
I don't know if I like the idea of being a cell relay. My arm would get tired holding the phone up I would think.
Cell towers are ugly, but people accept radio/tv broadcast towers, billboards, and all kind of other skyline pollution. Why the double standard?
I don't worry about EM radiation eminating from my phone, mainly because I know that most of the time it isn't doing anything while it's in my pocket, fairly close to an important part of my anatomy :)
But with P2P phones this wouldn't be the case, and given that currently views on the issue are mixed, I'd rather have my phone transmitting as little as possible. That means no P2P for me, thanks.
There's also the issue of a massively decreased standby time, seeing as my phone is going to be effectively being used all the time.
I'd rather have ugly cell towers than have yet more EM radiation and decreased battery life.
I guess if you're in a pissy mood and notice that someone is bouncing off of your mobile, you can shut it off in the middle of their conversation pretty much the same way people would shut off their Napster program whist you were downloading an mp3.
:)
/*drunk.. fix later*/
And if anyone wants pictures/more info on the new trend of disguising cell towers as trees:
h tm
http://www.signaltower.com/cellular_tower_tree.
Never ask a geek why, just nod your head and slowly back away. -Rob Malda
Anyone who's done any cellphone programming will know that there aren't an awful lot of spare CPU cycles going begging when the phone is idle, and there are hardly any at all when you're in a call.
Unless your phone has more CPU power than you need for normal use, and why on earth would the phone manufacturer do that?? - it'll just eat battery and make the phone uncompetitive.
Sorry, but you can't get this sort of system for free. It will cost, in more expensive handsets and/or reduced battery life. Not to mention a re-run of all the safety research as the things will be transmitting on a higher duty cycle even when you aren't deliberately making a call.
[Disclaimer: The above is all true for GSM systems as used in 199 countries of the world. I gather things may be a bit different in the USA.]
I've already been operating a 12VDC powered cellular jamming system in my truck for over a year. It is simple to make (just a PA driver and some circuitry to generate a null signal). With a 10W amp, it saturates the entire 800 MHz and 1.9 GHz cellular bands with an active carrier, making it impossible for other phones to reach the cell towers. It's about the size of a phone handset. My coworker and I found the range to vary from 80 yards to 110 yards. I am presently dumping the signal out of my own cellular phone antenna, though I have considered using a rotatable omnidirectional antenna to target particular vehicles, but this would be quite conspicuous; a bearded linux hippie would most likely call me in to the Highway patrol, so I have to stick with the smaller iteration. Yes, it's illegal, but how many cops are searching cars for cell phone jammers?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
it would probably work as a serverless p2p á la Gnutella / Flock, otherwise you would still need to connect to the antenna to call.
... but that is really all the same connection
How would the latency of all the "packets" coming together from one end of the call to another ?
Are cellphones capable of more than 1 connection at once ? They have signalling with the antenae together with voice
This type of dynamic wireless network is generally called a "parasitic network".
My background and schooling is in market analysis and valuations. With just enough economics and statistics to make me dangerous I have for some time been toying with a concept for an alternative economy based upon the services provided by each individual comprising the economy. Extra storage space, power, bandwidth, relay, intellect, kidney... you get the idea. The accounting would be daunting in any age other than this one but I suspect barter will come into play big time until the Status Quo Ante of our elected governments play catch up with the legislation.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Sometimes new technologies make me think why nobody thought of that before. This sort of technology works, as witnessed by the great success of the Internet. Although it's going to put a strain on batteries if all those cellphones have to be constantly sending data...and once they go down, you might suddenly lose your connection. And it sure isn't going to help people in distant areas with low network densities, because mobile devices will also be scarcer there, resulting in a higly unreliable network. Overall, though, I think it's a good idea to spread traffic over more nodes. Heck, P2P for short-distance and using specialized hardware for long-distance is a proven concept.
---
Novinson's Revolutionary Discovery:
When comes the revolution, things will be different --
not better, just different.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Here in Kitsap County, WA they just make them into huge flag poles. It must be the Navy.
!Yvan Eht Nioj
One of the best Simpsons EVER!!!
Hug your neighbors root today
Aw come on,
My cell with the lith-ion battery has a standby of about 48 hours. It came free with my AT&T cellular service (yeah, a contract.. which is already up), it's just a cute little ericson full-sized. Yeah, the mini ones run out faster (AMAZING!), smaller batteries and all.
May I also point out, that at no point is your phone truly 'idle' It's sending packets to the nearby cell tower going 'here I am' every once an awhile anyway, and it's always actively scanning the signals it recieves for the messages that are intened for it. So yes.. this will affect the battery life on a phone, yes if you want to get by with an ancient phone (older than 2 years) it'd suck. No, this technology isn't Implemented in those phones, so they could neither benefit nor suffer from this service.
In cities, where I have trouble getting a signal on the sidewalk (too much concrete, no line of sight), being about to bounce a signal off other phones would be awesome!
so far as security goes, no more, no less, than a wireless is now. the fact that the broadcast power would be lesser might even help, would get the signal closer to the ultimate in secure transmission, a Beam.
-GiH
This seems like a really lame idea. For a start I dont see how it can be so effective - the reason you get a good signal to your cell tower is that its in a nice clearly available place that you can see almost anywhere. How is the phone in my pocket going to make a connection at street level through a dozen streets and building walls to make a connection with someone else's phone - all using a relatively low power signal. As everyone else has said...erm..Battery Life!! Finally...what is the latency going to be like? All these hops equal kakky latency, which cell phones have plenty enough of to begin with.
Why the P2P trend lately?.. The technology isn't that great.. After this and the story the other day about P2P TV networks, I'm really wondering why there is so much hype..
I know when I use Kazaa, i frequently get 0.5 Kb/s transmission speeds, and "Remotely Queued" or "More Sources Needed" messages.. Do people really want this to happen to their phone calls, TV programs, etc etc?.. P2P networks have a lot of overhead spent just to determine how to distribute nodes and route data -- I just don't see it being ready for any kind of realtime application...
In addition, there's the problem that many people have already pointed out, which is that, by keeping the transmitter powered up at all times, you'd run down the battery faster. Not to mention that it might be impossible to make a call of your own while your phone was relaying someone else's call...
In other words, nice thought, but it's not really practical. (Yet?)
Eric
Be who you are...and be it in style!
How would this reduce the amount of traffic going through towers? The only traffic that wouldn't go through the tower is traffic that has enough turned-on phones running that software between you and the person you're calling. All other connections would hop through a few phones and go through the tower anyway. At best, local calls wouldn't need to go through towers. This would vary based on the density of cell phone users in your area compared to the density of towers. At worst, one's range or reception from a distant tower could be improved. Of course, there are also the security and power issues mentioned by others to take into consideration. Neat idea, though. Maybe if everyone had a cell-phone with a great battery and an impressive range, towers for local calls, at least, could be eliminated and used just for outgoing calls. So the cell phone network would be one of separate P2P networks connected by towers. That is, until the population is dense enough to send a call from New York to California.
http://websolr.com — fast, hassle-free search, powered by Apache Solr
What unused power? Where? My cell phone battery is inadequate as it is. Unless they're also developing fuel cells, they'd better rethink the whole concept of 'unused power' in cell phones. As far as I can tell, it doesn't exist.
"Suppose you were an idiot..... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeate myself."
Imagine phones that don't use Telco hardware at
all. Information hops from phone to phone,
finding it's target via other people's phones
exclusivly... What would the big Telcos do then?
Would they care? They certainly would boast the
better, more reliable connection. But if such a
system could be worked out, where individuals
could CHOOSE to opt in to such a system... would
it create a (virtually) free method of
communication that no corporation could charge for
or userp? Hmmm... Open Source Cellular?
Above comment is personal opinion. Poster is not a spokesperson.
This sounds very useful. A bit like the original switch from circuit switching to packet switching for land lines. If done right, this should be cheaper, better, more flexable, and at least as secure. I wonder if we might not be better of with a new cell phone protocal designed from the ground up for packets, though?
I noticed one person already commented about security issues, but given that some phones broadcast to the cell tower "in the clear", these can't be WORSE. Of course, most phones these days are more secure than that, and already split the signal into tiny "packets", and then transmits each on a different frequency. They do this for reasons of efficiency, but it does make for security. Phones using the tech should be similarly secure, even without some elementary encryption (which I hope does get implemented, of course).
This isn't going to be magic though. Only in dense cities you can assume there will enough spare capacity to make this interesting, and even then you'll need towers (although fewer). Out in the country, you'll need just as many towers as always though. On the other hand, the real benefits are going to be from reliability, better signal strength, load sharing, etc., not fewer towers.
Interesting to note some talk just the other day about Wi-Fi networks moving towards a more cell-phone like system, complete with towers. Now cell phones may end up looking more like distributed networks!
I had a similar idea but using particle entanglement as the transmission medium. I know the technology isn't there(and may never be) but bear with me a moment. Let's say you manufacture phones that have one million halves of entangled particles, preferably entangled molecules. If every eight particles is entangled with 8 particles on a different phone you can have 131,000 separate connections. Each of those phones would also have 131,000 unique connections. It doesn't take much to make a peer to peer phone network with such a setup.
The problem is that if such a communication device becomes feasible, will the manufacturers make them? Surely they would prefer a centralized model where the other half of the entangled particle resides in a network switching device so they can charge for switching.
OK now take this a bit further and you can make wireless network cards with unlimited range, keyed to a handful of other network cards. Next thing you know there is a growing peer to peer network whose infrastructure is virtually impossible to disrupt. Private networks can be created whose communications are impossible to intercept.
Cat
Add on another feature; plug the relay into your phone line, and when you're at home or near it, your cell phone becomes a cordless phone
I had a cell phone that came with a small base station that I plugged into my regular phone line. If someone called me on the cell number and I was within range of the base station, it would still ring the cell phone but connect via the base and I'd have no airtime charges. If I made a call from the cell, same thing.
The cell service was through the same company I had my regular phone service with. The thing I never thought of at the time is that I was never clear on what happens if I'm already on one of the lines and someone tries to call from/to the other line.
Nope, no sig
How 'bout if everyone who got a phone also plugged in a base station at their house?
...HOOOooYAH!!" - Duff Man
Or, as Bob Cringeley suggested, your car.
Your cell phone carrier could say: your service will cost $X a month, or it will cost $X-Y a month if you get a relay installed in your car or home.
"What Ever Happened to Fair Use?!
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
My TDMA phone already has an annoying delay of about a 1/4 second. Hop a conversation through a few handsets and I'll bet an Iridium phone looks pretty attractive...but then there are those Ugly Iridium Flares...
Add on another feature; plug the relay into your phone line, and when you're at home or near it, your cell phone becomes a cordless phone
You know, I've been waiting for them to come out with a cell phone that was a cordless phone when within range of its base station(s). I'm sure it would be slightly larger than today's current crop of ultratiny cellulars, but not by much.
I'm sure it would be complicated but might even be worth it to come up with some way for the base station to add the cell line automatically as a conference party when you left base station, simulating a cell-cell handoff.
I think a better example of a P2P network is that direct connect feature that some service providers have. you call someone, you connect to the person via the tower, you hit a button and poof! you're talking on a direct walkie-talkie connection with the other person.
That way the tower just acts like a coordinator rather than a server.
I don't know if I'm right here, but isn't this how the nutella(sp) network works?
Blaze a trail to the New World
with all those hops, how the hell will you hold a conversation?
Every year the National Park Service spends millions rescuing idiots who do stuff like decide to hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon with a cell phone but no water bottle.
Without wireless service in secluded areas, people who deserve to become statistics will do so without a hitch, rather than getting helivac'd out at the last minute because they happen to have their trusty microwave-emitting companion along.
Anyways, who the heck goes to an isolated area to talk on the phone?
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
their business model is charging you per second or minute that you use the service. without going through a centralized system like cell towers they lose this ability.
very nice, but not gonna happen due to existing billion dollar companies not liking it.
...enough about battery life... I'd rather not have my phone irradiating my kidney's (or whatever it's strapped near) while I'm wandering around the mall...
This is a stupid idea...
They could run the gateways to the wireline network, and bill the call's originator.
Hmm, but what about calls to another cellphone?
That would be a fun network to design.
Some tech recently invented by Larry Fullerton could make this feasible. It uses pulses instead of continuous sine waves, and uses 1/1000 the power of sine transcievers. Fullerton's company Time Domain is working on building commercial products. Apparently it can support "almost unlimited" bandwidth. Now if only it was available.....
Like eagles on pogo-sticks! -- Glottis
Use cars instead. Running automobiles are more common than dopes with cell phones glued to their ears (although it's almost a wash now). Running automobiles have more than enough battery power to spare.
DRL
Which, BTW, is one of the topics the IETF is working on... along with a ton of other researchers.
Why is this so hard. I have engineer friends who figured this out years ago.
If only everyone could buy a box for their rooftop that did this via 802.11b or a. Internet in the hands of the people. The problem would be getting on the wired part of the internet, but if there was a way for big business to take a part in this, it would make it pretty cool.
Too bad the range is so low on 802.11. If you could get 100 mile links out of it somehow, there would be little need for wires.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
God, why is everyone trying to apply the P2P paradigm to everything? Somethings just work better in a base-remote configuration. And I would guess that cell phones would be one of them. The only use I could see for this would be as a secondary mode for a phone to switch into to if it is losing the signal to a cell tower. All the phones would be in passive mode all the time, listening, and if a phone began to lose signal it could switch to a promiscuous mode to route calls over near by phones to get to the closest tower.
Analog cell phones transmit on one frequency band and receive on another, making it impossible to receive a signal from another cell phone directly. It's done this way so that the phone can receive and transmit at the same time without interfering with itself. I don't know how PCS phones work, but this scheme will never work with analog phones.
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
Cool stuff, really.
Wouldn't it be interesting if you could get a rebate for packets you forward?
There's already about 250ms delay between two people on cell phones due to encoding and signal relay issues -- and it drives me nuts. It seems to me that adding even more hops between me and the person at the other end of the line (other end of the wave?) might increase the delay to the point where I would find the phone unusable.
Isn't this more or less how Ricochet used to work?
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Wasn't this brought up shortly after 9/11/2001? Yes, I do believe it was, and the facts remain - this is a waste of time. Nobody is gonna want to play basestation alpha for the world around them at the cost of their battery life. I like the fact that I only have to charge my battery every few days, unless I'm constantly recieving msgs, or talking. Batteries aren't really getting that much better - a phone is of little use to me if I have to charge it constantly. Not only that, but I still don't think the horsepower is there in the phone Joe Dirtclod picks up at Best Buy on sale for $19.99 with a 2 year contract to make this feasable yet. Now add the fearful soccer moms who think they'r cooking their brains, and increase the amount of traffic, and thus radiation. Oh joy! Where do I sign the 5 year plan? Do I get a cool portable antenna to wear on my head while I walk(can't use a cell in your car)?
for most people.
Let's face it, we can't share. Nobody here was taught how to share their toys, or play with others. The comments suggest that, and I believe that most people just really can't share. We're all too focused on ourselves to care about others...
This would reduce average power consumption of phones!!!! You would actually have MORE talking time then less. With more antennas, the power required to talk on the network would go down because you wouldn't have to waste all that power trying to talk to a cell tower miles away, as the closest 'tower' (cell phone) would be like 300 feet away.
Do you realize that power required goes up as the cube of the distance? If you want to transmit twice as far, you need eight times the power, that's what it means. So instead of requiring watts of power when you are talking, your phone would require milliwatts all the time (a hundred times less then today). Shut off backlighting and you don't have to worry about it.
This will never take off for the same reason that gnutella will die if we are forced to pay for bandwidth.
Cybiko - it's not great, but they have done it.
... Can you... damn dropped call!"
Here is their site if you don't remember this POS. (I've never tried one... sounds cool but no one has one to hook up with)
The question is: Are we going to be seeing the verizon guy going around standing next to people on cell phones saying "Can you hear me now? Damn!
Get your Unix fortune now!
That would be more fun than the phone scanners used for them cordless phones!
Wit.. if there were to use this... would other people use my minutes?! F THAT!
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
We have all seen how P2P networks function: usually it's a select few subsidizing the masses who are unwilling to share their resources. People are greedy. Non-geeks are even greedier. Most of the general public wouldn't understand how the idea of using many phones as a relay in a distributed fashion would provide them with their service as well.
Not to mention some technical problems -- look how reliable cellular service is now. Even in very well covered areas, call drops from all ranges of carriers and all types of phones are common enough to be annoying for most people. A Peer-to-Peer cell network would be even more unreliable than the current infrastructure, which would force the need to be verbose with things like repeating data to several relays at a time to minimize points of failure. It might work if you had several dozen relays all capable of working for you -- but that's not an efficient use of bandwidth.
It's helpful to remember that all the phones must share a single pipe which is the air in the frequency they operate in, so there is a finite amount of bandwidth available so it makes sense not to waste any. This is in contrast to p2p on the internet where each host has its own dedicated and usually unshared circuit and more bandwidth can be added by adding more wire.
What is to prevent people from turning their phones off to save the battery, and if that is impossible, taking the battery out completely? What if there are three phones active and only two relays available?
What about the situation where there is a low population density and thus even lower phone density? Is this a solution for urban areas only?
Even in urban areas, demand is going to increase and put more stress per phone on the network.
Clearly p2p isn't going to work for cell phones for some time. What the wireless companies need to do is get together and establish a grand this-is-it standard that allows any phone to be used on any network. There are enough providers that the cost of infrastructure development could be spread evenly across the market. This idea is flawed both in the social aspect and technically. Plus in a day when people are increasingly carrying phones around for emergencies, would you want the kind of reliability as afforded by Kazaa, an already developed p2p application?
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
Wonder how this works with that new Sanyo phone
where you can screen your voice mail as it is being
recorded. Forget security with cell phones never had it never will. Though I'd like to play some WP2P games.
According to the article it seems that their only real selling feature is to increase the robustness of a cell network without having to add additional towers. There might be other reasons to have P2P enabled phones but this one is just plain silly.
First, this would only really work in well-populated areas with high densities of regular cell phone users. But these cities are already very likely to have a strong saturation of cell coverage, and it is probably relatively economical to install new network towers in such high density areas.
Second, if an emergency occured, a la 911, where the load is exceptionally high, I can't imagine this system of low powered devices holding up anywhere near as well as a decently saturated network of towers (that also have a lot more power). The decentralized network might be theoretically more robust, but not if everybody's trying to make a call at the same time and not when the device range only allows for a very limited number of localized connections to form.
Wireless P2P and multi-hop) systems are really cool, but it's not going work for everything or solve every problem. One day they may become ubiquitous, but are likely to be first employed for niche applications only. Cell phone applications and benefits will probably be limited to local network communications.
Maybe such a system could one day be used to help improve coverage deep within buildings, or for very localized load balancing, but I doubt that they will or should be trusted technically as an alternative to building an independently robust network of towers etc. And, if they are only proposing the technology as an adjunct for increased reliability, then I just don't see a very strong business case.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
Each one supports the other cell callers further from the nearest cell, extending in a chain of small spheres back to the tower, rather than one large sphere that wastes all kind of energy sending random radiation off in all directions as far as it can reach.
The biggest factor in power expenditure is the ability to put the device into standby mode. The transmission power has relatively little relevance. If the device has be a routing node in a mesh network, it can never go into standby. Even if there is no traffic to forward, it will have to keep exchanging routing information with its neighours, in order to be *able* to forward traffic. This will suck the battery dry in a matter of hours.
Not to mention the other equally inexplicable down sides:
1) security - intermediate nodes can tap your calls
2) security - intermediate nodes can reroute or prevent your calls
3) quality - packet loss for a number of consequtive wireless links would be stupendous
4) quality - cumulative delay from a number of consequtive links would be disastrous (more so, if link layer retransmissions were used to improve packet loss)
5) you've got no neighbours, you've got no calls - where do you get the people who are willing to stand in a chain between you and the tower, while you yabber on with your girlfriend?
6) would you pay for that service? Would you trust the intermediate nodes to meter your call? Might be a few surprises in store when the bill arrives...
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
There's a toilet in almost every building in the country. Mandate the installation of cellular network relays in toilets, powered by hydroelectricity possibly, and the tower problem is solved.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
The cell phone doesn't have to send as high a power signal when you are using it, in exchange for having to send signal more frequently. Btw how does a cell phone know when it is switching cells.
You make the same assumption as some others who resist cell phones: having a cell phone means you are required to answer each call. What you call interruptable, I call available. You always have a choice as to whether or not you want to be interrupted.
When I'm meeting up with friends -- especially at a club where it's hard to find people -- it's extremely handy to be able to call them. When I'm in a movie theatre, it's on vibrate and I'll usually ignore it if I don't have some reason to anticipate an urgent call (no wife, no kids). And if I'm intimately engaged, you can count on me ignoring it, thank you very much.
I'm always surprised when people ask me with surprised shock, "You're not going to answer it?" if I check the caller ID and decide to let the voice mail get it. If I'm having a conversation with someone, the other person can wait their turn. It's the same etiquette that would keep you from interrupting two people in a lively conversation unless you felt welcomed or just wanted them to pass the salt. In this case, the caller doesn't know, so I make the decision.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Basic truth: for reliable low-power communication, at least one end of the link needs to be well-sited. That's why cell phone towers are positioned carefully. Even setting up an 802.11b network requires that the base stations be positioned in reasonable locations.
You can blast your way out of that limitation with power (the military solution), or only expect it to work in areas with very dense node populations (the urban WiFi solution).
This idea was looked at back when mobile phones were attached to cars. Back then, power levels were higher, battery life wasn't a problem, and antenna locations were better. Even then, it wasn't that attractive.
Amateur packet radio works something like this, but even there, what makes it all go are VHF repeaters sited on high places.
GMDSS, the Global Marine Distress and Safety System, really does work this way. Marine radios, since 1999, have had a big red "DISTRESS" button. Pushing this sends out a message that gets forwarded by every other ship that has GMDSS gear. But that's a specialized, low-bandwidth application.
While it is sending packets to the nearby cell tower going 'here I am' every once an awhile, it isn't sending out a signal to 'see' the messages sent it any more that your eyes do, which it sounds like you are saying by saying 'actively scanning;, because it sounds like active radar.
The small-but-noticable delay caused by the encoding/decoding process is already as bad as is usably possible. Adding packet-hopping to cell phones would increase this latency by a noticable degree, making them less usable.
I know cybikos are not cell-phons, but they do implement a similar packet-hopping technique. see Cybiko.com
P2P packet radio is an old idea. Check out the old Aloha and AX25 protocols. One of the best sites for amature packet radio is Tucson Amateur Packet Radio or Packet Primer.
I'm sure there are some <a href="http://www.kevinpoulsen.com/bio.html">ex- SRI employees</a> that would find this technology useful.
We got some
Clearly anyone who believes this is an idiot. It's the blue M&Ms that are gay. And the M&M people are still holding the tan M&M in solitary confinement without a lawyer or other advocate. As others have said, the newer blue M&Ms are much weaker and are genetically inferior to the other colors.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
- http://www.utilitycamo.com/
- http://www.utilitycamo.com/sites.html
- Alan Dick Enviromental Solutions
- Len Tech Telecom
Some have decent picturesBut some companies have been upset by camogflage requirements.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I've seen several comments pointing out that reduced battery life as a serious issue...
Here's another one: Signal degradation.
Anyone with experience in networking knows that while repeaters can be used to extend the maximum length of an Ethernet run, you can only repeat the signal so many times (4, for Ethernet, IIRC) before data error become an issue.
I paid for a Motorola Startac back in the day... $250 for a cell phone, and even with such a nice cell phone, loss of quality is pretty noticeable when compared to a landline... Wouldn't hoping the signal through 3 or 4 of these make for pretty horrible reception?
It's possible the loss of quality due to some other aspect of cell technology that I'm not aware of (digital signals and compression, perhaps?) I'd love to hear from someone who knows more about cell technology.
One problem with voice chat on the internet is lag from all the routing and processing that has to go on to get a packet from one computer to another. If a cell network starts working like this, wouldn't you get more voice lag than there allready is (if you listen close, there is a small delay on cell phones right now)?
The cellular tower is much more sensitive than a cell phone. A quick check shows that most Cell towers broadcast their signal at 100 watts. The Cell phone at only around 3 watts. I don't know what the phone to phone range would be, but it is likely that you could not reduce power on the phone and effectively communicate with nearby cell phones.
I'm doing my masters thesis on bluetooth ad hoc mobile routing, and one thing I can say is it is not easy to setup and maintain a routing structure. If you have a sparse distribution of nodes, you may run into connectivity problems, although the algorithms for routing become fast. If you have a dense dist, the routing becomes increasingly toughter, as you will have more pico-nets, gateways, clusterheads, and routing tables to deal with.
Scatternet formation has to be done with a distributed algorithm, since, at the start, no node knows where the others are. There are many more problems with a network like this, for information transmission, like latency, reformulation of the network when nodes move, or are turned on or off.
Now, if cell phone protocols were changed, ie, new cell phones were built to use ad-hoc networks, with cell towers as fixed access points and gateways, the idea will have a good future.
They already have a grand-this-is-it standard. GSM. The US just has to convert to the standard in the rest of the world.
With this type of technology you run into a few problems. Right now call encryption is stupidly easy to break.. The key is in the packet for gods sake.. But heres the thing ... you need a fairly specific peice of hardware to intercept/decode these calls and then you gotta shove it in a van right to get near the person you are trying to track.
... so now anyone with a phone can potentially break this kinda encryption really easy and already have a nicely packaged sniffer handy.
In this model everyone has the device near the people they know and it would be really easy to setup this kind of software on the new fangled pda-phones
plus within a cell session right now they transmit the key in a certain packet and its easy to miss. on this kind of system the key would have to be sent with every hop or it'd be useless. (more repeater points the more likely for it to be tapped).
To make this viable you would HAVE to impliment a secured pgp like enc scheme where to call someone you would need their pgp key too to have even basic security. Now to the question of how provide a public key to each user... we all know phone numbers are 123-1234 in north america... and can be easily remembered but a cell phone would have to have either an extra set of digits or some way of securely setting up an encryption setting... This would require the sending phone to encrypt the data to your pgp key and thats just not going to happen. I for one am not giving up my nice panasonic gigarange for some new tech so i can talk to 2% of cell phone users or something stupid like that...
So where does that leave us... it gets enc'd from the tower before it enters the "public" repeater network. The sheer amount of processing power now required by the cell tower jumps from providing stupidly simple xor enc to 128 bit security.... I cant see cell companies wanting to setup these networks with this new requirement.
And then the bugfactor hits...
Today it was released that all current sms-enc phones can be tapped due to joe morons bug that makes the pgp useless.
This idea is totally impractical and when the general public starts getting real mobile computing power we're gonna see the current networks collapse to privacy concerns. Because it wouldnt take much to turn a pda-phone into a pda-interceptor so long as the antenna was available to the operating system.
and dont post back... oh well they'll just block antenna access on all devices and make it a law...
thats just as bad as the mpaa/riaa's new bill it wont happen.
anyways this idea cant work effectively in the REAL world.
The major stumbing block, and why this idea cannot immediately go to cell phones, is the notion of band-split and the fact that the cell-phone network is fundamentally circuit-switched (as alluded in the article).
Mobile devices are licenced to transmit on certain frequencies and receive on another set. The base station (at the tower) has the opposite band-split. That's how a full-duplex connection is made. One can listen and talk without having to push a button like a walkie-talkie since there are two separate radio connections used together simultaneously. Mobiles typically transmit on the low side of the band and base stations on the high side.
In order for a mobile to act as a base station (for the purposes of repeating or P2P), it would have to implement the radio hardware to do listen to other phones, like a base station does. Besides the licensing issues, cell phones do not offer this extra-cost (and potentially bulky) RF hardware.
The P2P cellphone idea demonstrated on 802.11 has a fundamentally different RF architecture, where one band is shared in a multiple-access fashion. It's also inherently a packet-switched technology. In 802.11 band-split is not an issue for P2P.
Anybody want a peanut?
How do they do packet routing?
Imagine a very dense area of repeaters and a tower. Phone A can't talk with the tower but a lot of phones can and moreover there are a lot of phones that both A and the tower-able phones can route over. Is there some form of "Yes, I will route for you" that cascades up the tree and first-come-only-served? So if A can hit B can hit C can hit the tower, then A sends a request, B gets it, broadcasts it *again*, C gets it, knows it can hit the tower, responds to B, which then responds to A?
Anybody know how this really works so I don't have to pull ideas out of my ass? ^_~
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
Is it that big of a problem? Really, I'm always surprised at how often I can connect, even in fairly remote places. I use my cell phone quite often, and I rarely experience dropped calls--not enough to be terribly annoyed.
I can see using this idea in another way. -- the earlier article a week or so ago about putting them in cars. Actually like a co-located phone company server/switch somewhere in your car. put them in UPS trucks or whatever. It would be neat if they could beam the signals to low earth orbit satellites or those high-flying airplanes that act as satellites for a large geographic area. Cars have the power to do this, and you can put bigger & better antennas on them. Offtopic, but are the auto manufacturers thinking about adopting a standard for getting future electronics into cars? (like, 6 x 6 x 12 compartments?)
However, by the time the industry got around to working something like this out, the problem may already work itself out in different ways.
Cellphone towers aren't that unsightly anyway. I'm sure the people that don't like them are the biggest cellphone users.
Will I have to pay for routing your calls through my phone?
Intelligence is a matter of opinion.
Something like this won't really be pratical until battery life has far exceeded current standards. The difference in battery drain in stand-by mode and in-use mode for most phones is significant, I expect that this would drain batteries in a manner more like the latter rather than the former. As a result, I doubt that it could be implemented in any sort of practical manner at the present. . .
There is a fundamental technical problem with this approach, or any approach that involves randomly moving repeaters on a grid. You might expect that the sum of the random motions will result in on-average good coverage, and you'd be right, but outliers (zones where calls would have to be dropped for lack of a nearby repeater) would be more common than you'd expect. This is a result of the well-known "birthday paradox". If you pay me, I'll even do the statistics for you, so that you have a quantitative answer. :)
This is the same reason unstructured computational grids formed by Delaunay triangulation of random points need to be refined heuristically before use.
1. The Obvious: "owning" another cell phone.
And how exactly are you going to do this? Are you logging into the other phones? No. When you access a site on the Internet are you directly connecting to that remote system? Not bloody likely, you're connecting through a whole series of systems. Don't believe me? Try a little app called Traceroute.
Hopping from phone-to-phone-to-tower is not significantly different, in regards to a cracking threat, than the in between systems you access when surfing the net.
2. Radiation becomes a REAL risk, because the main broadcasting would be done by the phones, not the towers.
Uh huh. Really? I don't recall any mention of the phones being goosed to 4 watts - or any increase in power output for that matter. If anything radiation would go DOWN - you only have to reach the nearest phone, not the nearest tower (which odds would suggest is further away from you). Inverse square law dictates a significant drop in output requirements.
4. Spam (another nuisance).
And how is this supposed to work exactly? See my response to point 1. Spam would have to be directly targeted to the phone itself via SMS or text messaging (which does happen now).
5. Viruses.
Again please explain this one. Sounds a whole lot like Point 1 again. You're hopping from phone to phone, not logging into the phone itself. The remote phone is lot running any applications on your behalf.
You're sounding like McAffee with the fearmongering.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Just what I want... a high-frequency transmitter randomly tossing out EM radiation while sitting in my pocket right next to the family jewels....
Don't fool yourself... SRI is trying to sterlize us.
And such a wonderful job P2P does too. You've already heard about the power issues this would create in a phone. Using those "unused" powercycles means you won't be using them later on. A cell battery is a very finite resource. Which would lead to another quite famous P2P problem: Sharing. It's no large stretch of the imagination to see people turning their phones off as not to waste the battery on these extra cycles, only turning them on to make a call. Or here's a good one-- Lag while the phone attempts to sort a path to the nearest main node. You think those MP3 searches take a while sometimes? I'll stick with my Nokia, thanks.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I find it interesting that you think this is a good solution. The shorter the cell tower, the more radiated energy there is in the area close to the site, and the more towers that are needed to cover the same area. When you use another device to relay the traffic, it takes at least a doubling of the bandwidth (it has to recieve, and then send the traffic to the next node). With the addition of a bit of overhead, and possibly other traffic being relayed, the bandwidth problems become substantial in a hurry.
My cell phone is often on a charger, either at home or in the car, so no problem with battery drainage. No doubt being used as a relay would be an opt in proposition with many settings like your laptop sleep and idle modes. For instance, only relay while on a charger, only relay while over 50% charge, only relay 50% as many calls (power equivalent) as actual usage. Etc...
Users to be rewarded by relay discount points in their bills (think frequent flyer miles).
Encryption no more (or less) needed than regular phone. Why hack your relay phone, when you can just buy a scanner?
Maybe my phone will work in this near underground apartment, relaying though the phones above, then out.
More available bandwidth, more calls can get through, by using smaller, but more numerous relay towers, that are closer together, or hop around a tower that is saturated, like often happens Friday nights in this College town.
Huge events (or disasters) less likely to completely jam network (continue hopping until getting to an unsaturated tower).
Mini towers possible, by tying phones into land-lines or cable modems. Again, a customer discount or credit option.
With a diffuse enough network, and mbone like simulcasting, 4G services like mobile HDTV.
Cellphone network compatible laptops should hardly notice the relay drainage, compared to regular greedy CPU use.
Letter To Iran
i remember an idea raised about a year ago to help land line phone co's to make some cash off of payphones by leasing the space to wireless companies and allowing them to install mini antennae for cellphones on them.
wouldn't it be nice to have a "tower" at every corner of every block in a city?
sure in remote areas you would still need larger towers, but it would give better reception in cities and save the trouble of those huge towers
anyone heard of this idea b4?
Kenny Sabarese
www.kennysabarese.com
What? Where? I never noticed them.
When will the lawyers bring the first 'passive cellular phoning' case to court? ("But we have no evidence that passive cellular phoning causes any harm")
Another way for me to increase my cancer risk. Except it might be in my hip, not my brain.
Damn. that's actually not a bad idea. It deserves modding. Hell, you might even be able to make it self sustaining via solar power since the distance between repeaters isn't that great. Still, every light post has it's own power, so what's a few more watts? A lot of places along the highway that don't have cell coverage do have lightposts... You'd be outta luck on especially remote treks, but still... Anybody ever consider tethered balloons for those areas? High altitude, a not very noticable tether and you can color the balloon anyway you want...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
My credit card number is 421766..... wait... wait... wait... I hear breathing on the other end of the phone line. Oh, that's you? I forgot I was calling a phone sex number...
Can you hear me now? Good!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
to keep the government from being able to shut us down/monitoring, or the record companies/DMCA. Peer to peer internet.
That's exactly what many alpinists (including me) do here in the swiss alps. If something happens (or you stumble over somebody in trouble) at least half a day from the next barrack, just pray either the REGA rescue radio works (though the gov't regulations for amateur radio make those beasts so weak that murphys law applies) or your mobile. With solar driven mobile relays all over the place (many hut's and alps have them nowadays) coverage is pretty good. Enough for an SMS if voice doesn't work.
Issues of power conservation and security aside, this sounds like a way to build free (beer) telephone networks in densely populated areas - why we should we be paying the phone company per minute charges when "the phone is the network"? Why should we even be paying a monthly subscription?
Built the cell repeater into the new XM radio receivers. Anyone listening to tunes would be also be a repeater. I'd love a discount on the XM gear or monthly fee in exchange for that. My cell phone would also have a local, higher powered (than the cell phone) repeater just a few feet away while I'm driving.
Often there are a large number of very local calls, avoiding the networks and being able to connect directly with another mobile would be far more useful, the number of times when people make phonecalls from 2 parts of a shoping center or to their mate who is just walking into the office...
but it was suggested that there was no base stations and the system was run for free or at least at a reduced cost to the user. That is if the call could be delivered/conducted completely over a P2P style network there would be no cost involved for the user. That is I guess other than returning the favour to fellow users and letting their phone be used as a link in other peoples calls. I think the reward of there being no cost for some local phone calls would be better than just the hope of less base stations.
As far as I know, and I work with these things every day, the switch you speak of hasn't happened yet.
Switches are still interconnected with voice trunks, same as they always were. The trunks have been digital since the 60's, and the switches themselves have been digital since the late 70's, but the calls are still channelized in a TDM system, there are no packets of voice. The SS7 control links are packetized of course, is that what you're talking about?
What about the increased radiation? It's not just about distance, it's also about how much data you have to transmit.
/.ers must really be loneley if that aint a concern...
And fsck the battery lifespan, what about SPERM lifespan? God
If all that is needed to improve network coverage is a phone, then why don't operators buy back old, out-of-fashion phones that nobody wants, and leave them around but unreachable (eg. on top of lampposts of under pavement tiles). These could be used to improve network coverage dramatically. Sure, they would need a power supply, but no more than any cell tower.
As to the problem of people in the middle of the desert.etc. having poor coverage, im surprised they have any at all. If people know they are likely to spend long periods of time in these areas, it might be worth investing in a satellite phone instead
Visit Arro