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Being Wireless: Viral Telecommunications
sh4na writes "3G is out before it is ever in... because, as Nicholas Negroponte puts it, the *real* next generation is the Wi-Fi "lily pads and frogs" concept. Wouldn't it be great?"
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Unless, of course, Verizon, T-mobile, Voicestream, etc. "influence" their favorite congress rep and get some BS law passed claiming that VoIP on 802.11 is so cheap and available that the terrorists will use it to coordinate missions. And then, when someone uses your hub, you are now responsible for aiding terrorism.
On second thought, forget I ever posted this. Those bastards don't need any more ideas.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
This is all about people intentionally sharing their bandwidth. The people who buy the little WiFi thingamabob to shoot wireless Internet rays to all their computers don't have the slightest clue that they may be sharing with everyone.
Once some company comes along to close off these WiFi hotspots with their latest product, these viral whatzits are done for.
Then lets consider how ling it will take the "Bells" to wake up and notcie that thier stangle hold on the local telco market is threatened. It will not take too long for Congress to churn out some back-assward laws that stifle any creative use of Wi-Fi.
I really like the Linksys Wireless Routers/Firewalls, you can set up a dhcp reservation list by MAC address so if you want to share with your neighbors you can get their mac and let them in. things like that combined with keeping track of security notices, and basic security masures could make such a network as secure as your average broadband connection.
3G will not fail! Everyone just need to remember that it took more than 10 years for GSM to explode here in Europe, and it will probably take even longer for 3G since GSM allready handles talking. What the suppliers do not see is that we lack good services and a good way of charging for it. What is needed is a global standard for micropayments. I think that it would be great to get all the micropayments on my phonebill, even better if I could surf over to my service provider and check my spendings over the web using my phone/computer/camera/mp3-player/calendar/gamecent re...
And by the by, why isn'n there a plug-in enabling the new photo and video phone to show their images on a TV (when connected to the powergrid, the batteries will burn otherwise), and a plug-in to be able to play more advanced games... it would be (ta-da) the return of the cartridge games...
This looks so cool, but I must say, I've got my doubts about a carrier technology that is so vulnerable to interference being able to take out telcos who have the most powerful interference-generating machines on earth. It wouldn't take much to knock down the network, and the telcos and the government have their hands deep in each others pockets.
For that matter, it would be pretty easy for anyone with a beef to jam things up.
Between the greedy people, the stupid people and the malicious people...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Yeah, of course every consumer is going to share their broadband connection with every stranger geek walking past.
Consumers don't share, they consume. Peer to Peer is all about taking, not sharing. Most of the 'clueless home users' I know (and I can think of half a dozen right now) only share what they download; they don't add new resource to the network.
Once Joe(ly) consumer realises that his/her mp3s and porn will download 10% slower because of all this sharing of connections, he/she will call tech support, who will tell them how to restrict access to their own PCs.
For the people by the people doesn't work when most of the people are selfish.
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
He mises one crucial point, the backbone, this posting for instance isn't going to magically bounce from the middle of the UK to Exodus(?) by 802.11 alone, as illustrated by the recent crackdownby cableco's on publicly listed access points they're reluctant to support an essentially public network that runs contrary to their business model, and transcending the traditional backbone requires organisation and capital, something absent from P2P systems.
A concern is the finite amount of spectrum available in regards to the scalability of P2P wireless systems, as the number of users increases so does the baseload just to maintain the system, some clever managed routing will be required along with a wired backbone between nodes, if you use daisy chain style off-air repeating between nodes you quickly deplete spectrum and diminish the benefit of local frequency replication, basically the "everyone shouting in a crowded room" scenario.
"Distance decay" is a feature of the traditional phone network yet on the net people no longer communicate on the basis of geography, did that Wired article come from a server in Silicon Valley, New York, London? Does it matter, I don't particularly care, I'm just interested in the content. However the "lily pads and frogs" architecture is deeply tied to locality, it's easy to communicate with local nodes but it progressively gets more difficult the farther you go, again this leads us back to the backbone problem.
Another issue is misuse, free wireless reminds me of the net of yester year, you could for instance use SMTP servers all over the globe and the vast majority of users didn't abuse that facility, but obviously the small majority of spammers swiftly made that a thing of the past and continue to annoy us today, how would open wireless networks be any different? Control is needed, which leads back to structure and capital.
Call me a pessimist, but it's not quite as rosy as he makes out.
What ISP? If I understood correctly, there's nothing that's stopping me from buying wireless equipment, connecting it to a mail server and putting a few CGIs on it to let anybody have an account. No ISPs, and no bills to be paid with the exception of electricity.
If I offer a mail server, somebody else gives a web server, a few people set up chat servers and so on we could have a new network pretty soon. People could link it to the internet, but if it got big enough it wouldn't be really necessary.
Since I live in a high-density area, my system reaches perhaps 100 neighbors. I do not know how many use it (totally free) -- frankly, I do not care. I pay a fixed fee and am happy to share.
Umm... Aren't you still responsible for the data going out over your Access Point? If some script kiddie living next door sets up camp from his bedroom and starts sending out spam while using your Internet connection, you are going to be the one that gets shut down.
Also - I don't know about this guy but my bandwidth is too limited (even at cable speed) to let everyone on my street have a free ride. In some far off distant future utopian society that might be practical... but for now I only get 40kbps upstream and anywhere from 1Mbit to 3Mbit down so I'm not really anxious to share. Unless my data could somehow have priority over my neighbors. I'm the one paying for it after all so I should get full use of my pipe when I'm online. When I go to bed, they can have it.
In the future, each Wi-Fi system will also act like a small router, relaying to its nearest neighbors. Messages can hop peer-to-peer, leaping from lily to lily like frogs.
That will only work as long as you are inside city limits around neighborhoods and businesses. But what about when you're driving down the highway and you're out of range?
Check out http://reseaucitoyen.be/, a project in Brussels that has been pushing this idea for some time.
It's in French. Translation: take a WiFi card, attach an external antenna.
Next, take an old Linux box, turn it into a router.
Aim towards another node, and you join the network.
Security is easy: treat this segment as being unsecure and use your existing firewalls.
Basically such an architecture creates a public infrastructure on which all kinds of services are possible.
It's cheap, robust, and a serious threat to the telcos.
Negroponte is right: 3G is the Telcos trying to define the future, when the future is busy happening somewhere else entirely!
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
So in your opinion do the ISP's just fall off the face of the earth due to wireless communications? Sure, you could set up a wireless network in your community and not have any internet access. You could set up the mail server, someone else could operate the intranet server and you could ignore the rest of the world. But if you want hooked to the rest of the internet you'll need someone with a connection to it. That person will have to pay for it and if only one account is set up and your entire neighborhood or community is using that one account, how does the ISP make enough money to justify staying in business?
-= Why can't I add 'Anonymous Coward' to my list of Foes? =-
If people can't set their AP up to do this easily, it won't happen, due to huge gaps in the net.
First of all this article assumes Voice over ip will be perfect(HA!). Also, have you ever tried to download while warchalking? Its near impossible to roam from network to network (any 802.11 protocol) and still retain connections over TCP/IP. All the equipment handles roaming differently. Why? Take a look at the standard, there is hardly anything there to talk about Roaming. So all the hardware manufacturers have taken it upon themselves to devise their own way to implement roaming and in the process made sure that complete seemless roaming was impossible under the current scheme.
802.11 and the others like 802.11b were built to supplant wires, not to allow full movement like the mobile phone networks.
When you shoot an arrow of truth, dip its point in honey. --Arab Proverb
You can only serve so many people off of a cable modem line. Once more than half-a-dozen people get online, your wireless connection will be no better than dial-up for speed.
Cable/DSL isn't exactly at massive penetration levels. People by the droves will still need to pay for lines at $50 or so a month. It is just that those lines may be shared among a few friends now.
You're not going to have 200 people sharing one cable line. The quality would be terrible and no one would be interested.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Aside from the typical /. geek that knows the risks of WiFi (overlapping, channels, WEP, security, etc), this would be a nightmare if every Tom and Jane of the world tries to start up their own mesh node. Hell, it was hard enough getting the 300+ residents at my college to agree on the same damn workgroup and network settings back before we actually had wired dorms (we ran our own cables). A call for some type of infrastructure (no matter how basic) is still going to be required for this to work right. I can imagine someone getting a mesh working in a small town, then some dumb shmuck runs their own WAP and fucks the whole network up for 2 blocks. I don't mean to rant, but I can see a lot of headaches if this sort of thing isn't planned out properly.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I'd love to know where this guy gets the idea that data services are increasing at a rapid rate. Here in the US telcos are in financial trouble because they bet on that very same thing happening, and its not. Most folks use their cell phones to make phone calls and thats it.
Next I'd love to know why this guy thinks that there would be a critical mass of people savvy enough to participate in such a p2p network. How many of your friends and family know how to fully use their cell phones including all their various features?
Also who here would like to have their ability to make and recieve phone calls contingent on the good graces of others? Without telcos you have no garuntee of service. When there are service problems who will you call? Why on earth would the public at large want to manually handle their own communications networks? Its akin to everyone running their own switchboard just to save a buck. It might be great fun for the geeks out there but for folks who are either too lazy or too busy (i.e. everyone else) this just isn't going to appeal to them.
Lastly there is the is the issue of bandwidth. Just because you pay a "fixed fee" for a certain amount of service that does not absolve you from letting the neighborhood run buck wild with your connection. If enough people use your connection in a manner which disproportionately affects your ISP, they WILL bill your butt for the extra costs and then where will you be? Do you think any of your everything must be free loving neighbors will pitch in to help you in your plight? I don't think so. I'm also sure the fad will die down after the first few cases of someone's line being used to traffic in warez or illegal pr0n causes the authorities to come down on some unsupecting "ISP account sharer".
So in short, I really think the geeks should just stick to the technical stuff and leave the business plans, or non-business business plans to the professionals.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
What about security and privacy?
I said the same thing back in the 70's about ethernet! there's no security or privacy on that!!!
It's a communications system and hardware.. it's going to take software, friewalls and encryption... just like the rest of us have used for years on the internet. It's unfortunate that consumers and retarted IT managers/people just throw a Accesspoint on the air without learning anything about it. and it's not going to change until either the hardware makers embed SSH/GPG inside the accesspoints and cards/drivers or peopel start getting their accesspoints used and busted for hacking/kiddie porn.
I presonally hope the latter... a rash of Joe-middle class getting busted and beat up mercilessly by 90 ATF agents and their walls of their home busted in by a tank because he "hacked" amazon.com. (well that is the way you arrest a dangerous hacker right?) or a bunch of companies get busted in a kiddie porn ring..
until you force people to use their brains... they love to walk around in their stupor haze.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Nice idea..
Unfortunatly reality isn't that simple. First, the routing problems are a lot different from those in tradiotional ip or gsm networks. Suppose you would have 1000+ wifi node network in your city, how would you find the way hopping from node to node to your friend? Even worse, many of the nodes are moving in cars and busses, and just as you have found a nice route through the network some of the nodes have moved or went down.
I'm not saying routing dynamic mesh network is impossible, it's just very hard, and can easily consume most of the bandwidth available.
Besides, if a hop is aroung 100m, a packet travelling 100km would be a 1000 hops away! A user of mesh network will miss the low latency and reliability of gprs networks with the current technology.
The main problem with mesh networks is that they do not scale very well.
signatures pending - ansa@kos.to - (dont mail there)
umm what happens when you have no 802.11b signal what do you fall down to ?
..... I dont think so
what happens when your out in the middle of backwater and you really do need that towtruck ?
you need GSM still
3g networks are not stupid they would much rather have VoIP and manage everything as data anyway and are infact asking handset people about this Nokia is very keen to sell stuff that use's VoIP and management of bandwidth strange
regards
John Jones
Note that the telco and cable monopolies are fighting this already. Most of the EULAs contain terms that ban reselling the service. They are actively searching for customers who install a wireless access point, and threatening them with legal action (or just terminating their service). They understand the challenge, and want to maintain their monopoly.
/. several times.
One of the more entertaining aspects is the customers who fight back by pointing out that they
aren't reselling the service, they're giving it away for free. The telco/cable guys aren't amused.
This has already been reported on
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The biggest problem that the article barely touches on is that there aren't a huge number of non-overlapping channels. If three homes in a row all use the same channel, stand out on the street and watch what happens to your signal quality.
As others have noted, if one home is on xDSL from company Y using one public IP address and the next "hop" is using Cable from comany Z using another public IP address, at best case scenario, your data transmission will suffer a temporary silence. In more likely scenario, you lose connection with an associated AP, your PC attempts to renegotiate with an AP, grabs IP information and reinitiates IP connection.
How long does this take? Too damn long for VoIP or even a web page to load. You could of course set IP Leases to expire every second to help, but talk about broadcast storm.
Also, until full T1's or T3's start getting run to every home, DSL's and/or Cable modems just can't handle 25+ people all downloading files acceptably. Put the number up around 100 and it is not a pretty picture to paint.
Even if the performance were to be acceptable, how long do you think it would take for DSL providers to realize that for every 1 customer, 15 are using it without additional revenues for them? Expect heavy handed TOS to put and end to that quick.
I think the idea is right, but his visualized implementation is flawed. Now if he said a meshed network powered by WISP's with a cooperative agreement, that would make more sense to me.
Just my $0.02 worth.
Are you happy if your boss gives you twice the work at the same pay? why then should they be happy providing twice the service at the same pay..
I case you don't know him, he is the perpetual tech optimist Gilder Tech Report.
These wall street, talking heads are always so optimistic about technologies that they fail to see their shortcommings. I love new technology as much as any slashdotter, but do you think for a minute that reliable wireless data will be built on a technology that can be knocked out with a 2.4 GHz cordless telephone?
Gimme a break.
-ted
And from the article:
"The new thinking will also impact places where wireless penetration is conspicuously low -- among real water lilies and frogs, ironically, in some of the most rural, remote parts of our world. A dirty little secret about 802.11b is that it can cover more than 20 kilometers with suitably directional antennas."
I agree that WiFi, even with 20 km PoPs, is still not a GSM or 3G, etc replacement. I live in a rural area myself and there are no WiFi spots that I know of. This is mainly because you can ONLY get dialup!! What's the point of sharing a 28.8 (sorry, we are too far from the city 56k) over 1000 feet whetn your closest neighbour is 1 km away and you don't have a big enough pipe to support your own home LAN?
Yes, I agree that mobile phones will not go away any time soon, but it would be more interesting for VoIP to be able to tap into 802.11 frequencies automatically and communicate over the internet. Now THAT would make both 802.11 and mobile phones more useful, and give companies that produce both devices a new lease on life. It would also allow for you to get phone reception in your apartment, in the hallway, in the basement, etc where you don't get any signal right now.
(Note: I have heard that such things were tried already in Europe, under the name of 'Kermit' and some other names as well. They were failures. The difference here is that the phone would use 802.11 as a backup as opposed to tying you down to a PoP all the time.
Remember, when mobile phones first came along, "mobile" meant "not fixed to the wall". You could not move while talking. There was no handover. If you went out of reach of your base station, you would lose the call.
Still, this was a huge first step, as is Wi-Fi.
The real pushback could and probably will come from the ISPs. You don't really have a legal right to share your home connection with your neighbors. Of course, it depends on your service contract, but most home service contracts probably explicitely disallow this, and we have heard about ISPs taking steps to stop it.
What few of the businesses in the effected market segments (3G, home DSL and broadband) realize is that any control they have could be strictly temporary. As the article points out, once the density of lilly pads is high enough, you have a robust mesh of nodes, and everyone is connected.
Obviously, there are technical issues to work out. The network needs some heirachy, or you have to hop through thousands of nodes to get accross country, and the latency will kill you. As it stands now, it is a star topology, since I don't think any typical base stations will route through neighboring base stations. On the other hand, there are some really promissing technologies that could do this very well.
All it will take is a bit more advocacy, but some of the current advocacy approaches can't work in the long run because of problems mentioned above. Instead of promoting the use of security loopholes in existing basestations, we have have to develop the free/open hardware and software to implement the appropriate infrastructure. A small box with an array antenna and a smart router could provide all the local coverage and network connectivity through neighboring identical boxes, and a few high end routers with more complex tranceivers, and even hard wired connections could connect the rest to the backbone.
If this is done right, it can't be stopped easily by legislation. The only real difficulty would be getting enough people to install these rather than something that wouldn't play with this network. It could look very much like the Linux vs. MS competition. Many of the commercial players will at least attempt to behave like MS and use any tactic to squash it, and this will make it difficult, at least initially, to penetrate the market.
Although this certainly hasn't played out yet in the OS market, I claim that the all or nothing approach that MS has taken will ultimately destroy them. In the short run, all sorts of things can happen, but in the end it is much more powerful to share knowledge freely, and those that attempt to hoard it will lose.
If your packet stayed on the surface of the water, on the pad the whole time, then yeah, routing is a bitch. But the idea is that it routes on the surface only until it finds a pad with a "stem" (internet connection). Then it tunnels down that high speed connection to come up much closer to your friend. But not everyone has to share their internet connection, those that are not simply pass along traffic on wireless only.
The real trick to this setup is how do you know where your friend is? I mean, if you're on wireless and he's on wireless, then the route to either one of you via the pads is a minor PITA. But not nearly as hard as the scaling problem you're describing.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Those are with directional antenna on the AP and the client. It's not a replacement for a cell phone unless you have a way to get the AP to lock onto your position. To get cell phone funtionality, the AP has to at least be omnidirectional, and for practical purposes the phone should be too.
However, I can see a good product would be an 802.11b VOIP phone that falls back to other cellular networks when unable to access an AP. This way, when you get signal, all your cell phone hours belong to you. You can just get a low hour plan to use in emergencies.
A VOIP system that would accept incoming calls and forward them on to your cell number would be good too
-no broken link
If this takes off, it really will create a mesh so that even in rural areas, the base station on top of your house (or better yet, the silo) will be able to connect to a handful of neighbors, and provide a fully redundant connection. I will be the only one suffering if I cut the power line to the router with the backhoe, because all the neighbors won't make the same mistake all at once.
Commercial providers aren't even interested in the remote areas, because there just aren't enough dollars to extract. Those annoying "can you hear me now" commercials just confirm my long time theory about corporate image advertising. They are always trying to reverse a real or perceived problem in their public image, and typically this is instead of actually trying to fix the problem. Anyone remember AT&T's "easy to do business with" campaign?
Just curious, I've been wondering for a while what your sig meant :-/
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
The argument about backbone fails to recognize the enormous supply of dark fiber resulting from the telecom debacles.
Seastead this.
I have no real reason to believe that 3G will be much of a success, but I expect that an unregulated, bottom-up mesh network would not do well, certainly not if it were based on existing 802.11 technology.
Networks like the GSM digital phone networks function because of their cellular organization scheme. There is a certain set of channel frequencies. Each "cell" uses a subset of this, and the the cells are organized in such a way that cells using the same channels can never overlap. In any system, such as 802.11, with a constrained set of data channels, there must be discipline to make sure that there is no overlap. Also, there is an absolute upper limit on how many access points can occupy a given area. The long ranges that the article mentions only make this harder to arrange. I can see a scheme where the hardware does its best to minimize the possibility of overlap, but in high density living areas, wireless network frequency doesn't strech very far.
I'd like to know where he gets the idea that performance increases with the number of stations. Just as with a traditional LAN, performance increases only with the number of switches/access points for local traffic or the number of uplinks, for internet traffic. Additional client systems do downgrade performance.
-----
On an unrelated note, your sig befuddles me as well:
"(a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)"
As nearly as I can tell, you've posted nearly 500 comments, but have never answered the immortal question: What's a "deltic?"
This is what I know:
- You've claimed here to have written a Space Invaders clone on your ARM-based Acorn when you were 15, which sets an upper limit of 30 on your current age--so I'd wager senility isn't an issue.
- From this post I'd assume that you were admitted to Bournebouth University--so basic literacy probably isn't an obstacle either.
- Several have tried--and failed--to get you to explain this condition:
But I have to admit, the question consumes me. Mister Jones, could you enlighten us, please?- What's a "deltic"?
by smartfart on Mon Sep 23, '02 10:43 AM
- OT: Deltic?
by Anonymous Coward on Wed May 29, '02 11:43 AM
- "Deltic" = "Doesn't Like Spellcheckers"
:-)
by billstewart on Thu Apr 11, '02 09:27 PM
- what the f*** is "a deltic"?
by Anonymous Coward on Tue Aug 14, '01 04:10 PM
- Re:What's a deltic?
by KlomDark on Tue Nov 14, '00 06:43 PM
--So you're either either not reading the replies to your posts (in which case this question is moot), or you're none too eager to discuss deltism.attached to Being Wireless: Viral Telecommunications posted on Mon Sep 23, '02 07:47 AM
attached to Intel Itanium 2 Benchmarks posted on Wed May 29, '02 08:01 AM
attached to AMD Targets Web Pad & PDA Processor Market posted on Tue Apr 09, '02 02:28 PM
Re:what the f*** is "a deltic"? by Head Lice on Wed Aug 15, '01 06:03 AM
attached to Best "Visual Studio" Alternative On Linux posted on Mon Aug 13, '01 04:14 PM
Re:What's a deltic? by KlomDark on Sun Nov 26, '00 06:26 PM
Re:What's a deltic? by Donut2099 on Tue Nov 14, '00 09:01 PM
attached to 3dfx Drops Video Card Division posted on Tue Nov 14, '00 08:56 PM
Obviously this would require dynamic routing of never before-seen levels of power. Does anyone have any links or book suggestions on dynamic routing? I've become curious.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
3G is so going to fail! Telephone companies are greedy! Anyone who pays $0.25 for a email message has more money than brains!
Digital services are slow to catch on here because the interface sucks, and the telcos screw you over on charges. Unlike Japan, there is no model (i-Mode services) for third parties to bring on their own revenue models. The greedy telcos want to provide everything for everyone, because they know best. That's why they're doing so well on the markets right now *cough cough*
This apathy on the part of telcos (and don't forget the greed) is allowing alternatives like 802.11 to gain hold. Don't forget that it's not just the technology, but social acceptance of the technology. If people just get used to there being 802.11 hotspots around a city where they stop - say, at the mall, grocery store, coffee place - and the devices to provide that access - say, handhelds and notebooks instead of cell phones - get entrenched, then 3G is dead in the cradle. I already see this happening, because the cost to set up a 802.11 access point is so small.
Another wildcard is a crackdown on PtP. It would be very easy for communities to set up their own PtP networks for this purpose - I know of a few university residences doing this to combat draconian rules on usage. More people get used to wireless, the more places it appears.
My $0.02..
..don't panic
1. Frog A and B both have wired servers which they report to everytime they hop to a new pad. These could be servers at home or a text file on your X MB of space you get at Yahoo or AOL or Apple. You're only transmitting via SSH tunneled FTP your account, password, and the current IPv6 address so it shouldn't be too much overhead. If you already have a session open, you transmit an authentication token from your new lily pad directly to all your open sessions (1 per machine in case you have multiple sessions on).
2. The lily pads themselves would likely know the most efficient pad to pad routes. There would be some sort of router that would handle the functionality.
cheap/simple only loses out to cheap/simple/better.
Create a cheap sealed unit that can give you firewall and virus protection, wi-fi, and a one-fee managed service and you'll have the basis for lily pads everywhere. But I'd look for it from people who truly care about user experience, not the geek brigades who are actively user hostile.
I'm not missing the step. most of those 200,000,000 people don't have anything I'm interested in.
Contrary to popular belief, not everyone spends their time surfing the net for MP3s and porn.
Central data storage, like government records, school records, etc. are better served by a nice fat landline.
Wireless is nice, but for bandwidth it doesn't hold a candle to fiber optics.
Optics has it's place -- and that place is the backbone. Yes, it would be nice to see universal availability of wireless for CLIENTS, but for heavy servers... they would still be better served by fiber even if it was just between distributed servers to rsync.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
A year and a half ago I started a project to do something pretty close to this. The goal is to use all opensourced hardware and software to make PDA/phone devices and a wireless grid. All the technology already exists and is even available in opensource versions. When you want to make a call you select the user from your address book or enter their address and they are tracked using Jabber to gain their presence info, then a VoIP connection is initiated between the two users. Of course this also makes implementing instant messaging, web browsing, etc rather easy. It's not a problem to encrypt the entire connection either of course and to handle roaming issues you can use a virtual network so as you real connection breaks and is reconencted (sometimes through a different route) everything stays stable because the virtual network hides all the little flaws from the end protocols. You don't need to select just one wireless protocol either. Put PCMCIA slots in the back of the PDA/phone and then as technology changes you can change with it without having to get a whole new phone. Put more than one slot and you have a multiband phone or can even connect over dial-up or normal ethernet.
My dream is to some day see it how the phones worked in Bruce Sterling's book Distraction. We're not quite that far yet but we certainly have all the technology to make a working opensourced phone network and phones.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Naming naming naming... How do we find and name resources on the network, or advertise our own services? DNS is a hierarchical system, you have a group of root servers, and that will be a weak point in a distributed system such as ad-hoc networks. The network might be free, but resolving objects will still rely on a centralized system. ANd the telcos, or whatever enemies of the ad-hoc network, can attack that.
Josh