Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Peer-to-Peer Cell Phones

Posted by timothy on from the can-you-hear-anything-now dept.

AlfaNatic writes "Seems like a new company has developed the technology to turn a cellular network into a peer-to-peer network. Soon you'll be able to share music and files off of your cell. Gotta love it!"

2 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. The major problem... by ethnocidal · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Is that your average cell phone rarely transmits or receives information. As an example, my T68 gets me about 300h battery life on 'standby' with just keepalive equivalents to the network. When I'm talking, this decreases massively, to about 5 or 6 hours. With a P2P network, as described recently on both /. and El Reg, you have continual data transmission and receipt, as you act as a data path for those around you. The battery life of the phones acting as nodes would be massively reduced. In addition, the phones would get warm, as they disappate the whole battery over a much shorter time interval than they are meant to. People won't use a system where they can get a battery life of about 6 hours, and where their pockets are always curiously warm. Add this to the uproar already about cellphone radiation, and you lose all possibility of such a aystem being accepted. (What's that? This cellphone is ALWAYS TRANSMITTING? SHUT THEM DOWN!).

  2. if it's truly peer-to-peer by anonymous+loser · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'd rather use it to call other folks on the network for free than exchange files. I just don't have enough storage on my cell phone to be sharing files, but a nice, cheap VoIP or similar would be great.