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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!"

5 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. I'm only going to say this once, by I+Want+GNU! · · Score: 5, Funny

    but if you ask me, this will be the death of the music and movie industries.

    --Jack V.

  3. 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.

  4. Re:PEER TO PEER != MUSIC SWAPPING by stratjakt · · Score: 5, Informative

    of course, if you had RTFA:

    "The technology gives users a digital store cupboard for their own media files and lets them pass them on to anyone who wants to use, listen or look at them on their own handset. "

    Of course, the word P2P is used incorrectly because I dont think this describes the topology, merely the end result.

    This sounds like a centralized client/server topology.

    But then people speak of XBOX, PS2 and CD Audio "isos", so using terms correctly isn't something that goes hand in hand with technology.

    --
    I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
  5. This is NOT P2P! by uradu · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.