Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Do We Still Need Telcos (and ISPs)?

Posted by Cliff on from the beyond-their-effective-lifetime dept.

eraserewind asks: "Are telecom providers and ISPs going to continue to be necessary in the future? Why are we all paying subscriptions for communicating? What I want is a global extremely-high-speed ad-hoc wireless data & voice network, where the only entry cost is a mobile phone (or newtork card or whatever). Devices communicate peer to peer, or routed via other people's idle devices. Remember there is no subscriptions, so don't expect to piggy-back on someone's paid for DSL bandwidth. What are the technological barriers? What kind of protocols would you need? What hardware advances? How would you solve problems of geographic isolation? Are there theoretical, political or economic reasons it couldn't work?"

1 of 650 comments (clear)

  1. An actual ANSWER... by zachrahan · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The question asked was about (1) possible problems with a totally ad-hoc communication model, and (2) what solutions to those problems may be. Typically, everyone immediately leapt all over the problems, but nobody seems to have any interest in the solutions.

    Well, here are some ideas about what you would need to make this work and to deal with the problems.

    Problem 1: Freeloaders. Well, you could design a tit-for-tat protocol where you never rebroadcast packets from a freeloader. Think Bittorrent, where if you don't share, you don't get good download badnwidth. The game-theoretic knowledge is there to design an ad hoc protocol where the Nash equilibrium behavior is to not freeload.

    Problem 2: Long Hops. OK, so long distance pipes cost money. And they won't go away soon, because some, posibly large, fraction of traffic needs them. So let the operators of the pipes charge tolls. You could have a whole ad hoc marketplace where some people let you use their hardware for free, and others charge. You tell your computer how much money and what QoS you want, and it tries to route effectively.

    There are problems here, of course. One is how to establish trust -- how to do billing in an anonymous ad hoc system? Some sort of self-signed certs might be made to work... or maybe we'd need a palladium-ish technology? Either of these solutions can also help with the problem of needing end-to-end encryption on everything.

    So there. I've thrown out some solutions. They may have problems, but at least its a start, instead of grousing about the original question.