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Peer-to-Peer Cell Phones
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!"
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all i need is someone exploiting a bug and getting all my personal information as well as EVERYONE I KNOW.
cell phones are full of sensitive data, and enabling file sharing is simply a bad idea.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Or does it literally hop from phone to phone, and leave the base stations out of this?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
[since Bandwidth it's a sort of new God..]
:) ... not to mention the RIAA coming to meet you in person while you're sharing.
It would be cool to hog bandwidth with cellphones
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
I wouldn't worry about the network load, but think of the load on the batteries. And the heat generated from your phone being turned on only to be a relay station. Worried about microwave radiation from phones now? This is it!
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!).
Be able to make peer to peer calls. If amongst friends you can setup trusted relay access through a network of phones, I'd be one happy camper.
That's the cellular peer 2 peer I'm waiting for. I don't give a rats ass about p2p sharing of files over my cell phone. I have GSM with full internet access and bluetooth on my phone. I'll use that, thanks.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
but if you ask me, this will be the death of the music and movie industries.
--Jack V.
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.
Cell phones are still expensive to use if you want to use it during normal "business" hours. And even if you don't care about the cost, they're still not particularly secure (though their security IS improving). Add to that the number of completely tech-clueless cell users and the lack of antivirus/security software for cellphones and you've got a nightmare waiting in the wings.
Definitely a BAD idea...
I very much doubt it. In fact, I don't see where they're going to find the radio spectrum to support most of the applications that are supposed to roll out when 3G gets implemented. Hey, we're fighting over spectrum now, and half the things people want to do with it haven't even been implemented.
Peer to peer is an application layer network "topology," that is, a description of connectedness.
It is NOT A SYNONYM FOR NAPSTER.
Yeehaw! 56k file sharing, until I get a static burst or lose my cell connection.
Oh, and I guess my 200 minutes a month just ain't gonna cut it anymore...
blek..
Imagine a beuwolf cluster of these!!
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
"The file you have selected to transmit is copyrighted. To cancel this transaction and avoid us completely discharging your phone's battery into your ear, press 1 now"
A possible solution to the problem of battery life and heat is to enable the cellphone P2P only when it is in it's caddy. This might limit the system quite a bit, but with a smart system maybe not. Also, a lot of people leave their phones in chargers at work, in the car, and at home, and they would do it even moreso if it was the only time their downloading worked.
You could still browse, search, and use normal cellphone operations while your phone was in hand, but it wouldn't begin downloads or uploads until returned to a charger.
I'm not sure how the noding would work, but with leaf node shielding and stuff, you might be able to limit searches enough to allow phones to receive upload and search requests while portable, but queue uploads and downloads until caddied.
Of course, they could always make new batteries and better phones that use less power while transmitting data too. Now they'll have a better reason to (instead of just making them smaller).
"Probably the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have to murder a loved one because they're the devil." -Philips
What kind of caption is that? That phone may show pictures, but it's the ugliest phone I've ever seen. Moreover, I don't want my phone to do all this crap. Here are the list of features I want in a phone, with a divider before those that would take my PDA out of the picture:
1. Ability to make calls, with clear reception all over the globe at all times of day (this is partly a service problem, but better phones could help)
2. Cancer-free
3. Ability to digitally download voice mail to the phone (with error correction) so I don't have to listen to it on a scratchy connection
4. Ability to act as a modem with just a cheap serial cord, no $500 kits
5. LONG battery life - I mean 1 week standby and 5 hours talk-time, worst-case
--
6. Ability to store phone numbers along with other contact info
7. Alarm clock, todo list, and datebook calendar
That's it. No mp3s, no videos, no file sharing. Just the things that would rock to have in a mobile, self-contained unit. It shouldn't have unnecessary buttons and gizmos. It shouldn't have musical ring tones (customizable ringing, yes; music, hell no). I simply don't understand the impetus for putting crap into a cell phone that would be better taken care of by other devices, separate from the phone.
Now, a Rio or some such that can wirelessly bounce around mp3s (even at a reduced bitrate) might be nice, but a Rio is made for playing music. A cell phone is made for communicating with people.
Some phones use software known as Java that lets them do much more sophisticated things.
... Java?
Java, you say? Facinating. Tell me more. What is this
Software Wars
If you didn't go broke on the costs of your cellphone calls yet, here's your chance !!
It's simply centralized data storage, a sort of global clipboard that allows users to share data. It seems they're simply buzzword huckstering. A real P2P phone system wouldn't be cell-based at all, but would transmit data directly phone to phone. There are projects like that out there, but there are serious issues of bandwidth and battery power, particularly with mobile phones.
Peer-to-peer also seems to be the cornerstone of getting your ass sued back into the Stone Age.
(* you can use the phone like a walkie talkie *)
Interesting how old ideas get repackaged as "cutting edge". First we had mainframes (large, central computers) falling out of style, and then coming back in style as "big web servers".
Now they call walkie talkies "Peer-to-Peer cell phones".
At this pace, punched cards will come back as, "magnet-proof external storage" or something.
Gotta love marketers.
Table-ized A.I.
P2Pish phones.
Upload from my home PC to my phone. Upload (from the phone? how much memory space you have there?) to your friends space on the central server. And he does what with it? D/L to his phone? Why? To listen to music? ewwww...watch a video clip? again...ewwww.
So he waits until he gets home, d/l's it to the house PC, and then listens to the MP3. OK, so tell me why did we need to go through the cellphone to do this?
Why not just use the current way of stealing music. My PC through gnutella or whatever, to his PC. Of what value is the cellphone and their network in all this?
Instead of file sharing, why not voice sharing?
That would be one way to get around having some many cell towers. Share your excess bandwidth with others.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
This is not that great, IMHO... From the article:
Its peer-to-peer system gives users their own storage area into which they can upload images, music files and games for use on their handset or to pass on to anyone else.
First of all, if the storage is central as this suggests (and it is, _average_ phones can't store this much yet) then it is not true P2P. Also, if it is central then it is legally defeatable, so forget sharing CD tracks.
Third, at the current data speeds (even the best networks) heavy media transfer will be slow.
Don't get me wrong, this does have a place -- about 1.5-2 years from now, and for sharing personal media, like photos, voice clips, sound clips (like your cat meowing or your kid saying something funny), maybe screenshots from future mobile games, etc.
Come play Moral Decay!
[Quoting from the article...]
"Some phones use software known as Java that lets them do much more sophisticated things."
Sigh, I hate it when I see evidence that I'm learning about a new technology this way.
Shoot, I may as well just start learning about foreign policy and macroeconomics from my political leaders on TV.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Isn't that what Nextel Direct Connect is ?
i've been thinking hard about this kind of thing.
to get true p2p wireless for hand-helds (which will soon include all cellphones), there are a number of things that need to happen, all of which will.
step one:
free throttled (but otherwise unlimited) internet service on an open-standard wireless bandwidth. bear with me here... this actually makes sense.
- a cellphone provider gives out free bandwidth to a popular park and nearby coffee shops or something.
- people use it to such a degree that there's never any bandwidth not being used and people have to wait in line.
- two devices come into the market: a client-only pda/modem which connects to the network and a router pda/modem which connects to and extends the network in the same kind of way as freenet (from what i understand of freenet which is very little)
- routing pdas get more bandwidth and priority over client-only pdas because they serve other routers and clients (thus an incentive to get a router)
step two:
this wireless network's range is extended by routing pdas and is later helped by a connection to another connection to the internet via somebody else's routing pda or via a similar network. now we see a true wireless internet form in much the same way the public internet did.
step three:
large wireless networks like the originals are no longer needed; pdas are almost all routers and are common enough to always be near one that is chained into the internet.
the basics behind this are simple. here is my vision of the future:
there are no central servers. let's say little john is on the bus going home from college. it's a long ride, so he takes out his pda, sticks the earbuds in his head, and starts playing music. that's all he needs to know. this music is not stored on his 64mb pda; it wouldn't fit. the pda instead sniffs out another pda, which gives him a peer-to-peer connection to his home computer (or maybe somebody elses, which has the music he wants). no satellite or cell-tower, and no isp, wireless or not.
this assumes that everybody's pda is always on (oops), so these suckers need really big batteries (not impossible; i've seen an ipod play continuously for 16 hours).
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Don't buy connection kits from the phone company. Get the cable from a 3rd party-- www.thesupplynet.com had cables for everything. I have a cable for my ancient motorola timeport to connect via the serial port as a modem, and one to connect it to my PDA. No software or ISP needed with Sprint, just use their QNC system (which is free as long as you have wireless web.)
Not sure how other cell providers are, as I don't really have any reason or means to tinker around with them.
RF transmissions suck up a lot of juice. A pda thats acting as a "router" is gonna eat through batteries in no time.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
... peer to peer software on my cellphone. How the fuck do you uninstall Gator from a cell phone?
*ring* *ring* Popup ad for a fucking x10 camera *ring *ring
Live web cams
the quote at the end of the article saying something like "key groups of users are currently left out because operators haven't figured out how to charge for it" is extreemly telling for how absolutely useless this stuff is.
phone companies want to bill you for every little thing you do with your phone regardless of wether or not to costs them a thing to provide. ultimately the -only- additional cost to the telco for these services will be the maintainance of a complicated billing network.
get a clue telcos. woo customers too your network with features. don't drive them away by trying to nickel and dime them to death.
P2P networking with mobilephones.. blah.. They speak about Java and Wap, but don't mention that on most phones Java midlets can't store anything on the phone, sometimes the midlet cannot even connect to internet. And when they mentioned Wap I figured out the whole thing.
Simply make a PHP (or JSP whatever) wap site that works as a fileserver that you can browse. Then let other people browse your files too. Now we have "P2P" sharing with mobilephones. But there are several problems. Ringtones etc aren't compatible, or if combatible format is used they sound really crappy. Also logos and picturemessages differ from phone to phone. And it's often impossible to send stuff out from your phone. (except with never models that use "real" OS like Symbian OS).
- Raynet --> .
I saw the intro, and I thought "Woo hoo, someone has come up with a truely distributed mobile phone technology."
I read the article, and it's just some stupid file sharing system.
Bill, *yawn*