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Do We Still Need Telcos (and ISPs)?
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?"
Its a nice sounding idea, and in a perfect world it would be possible. But who is going to pay for this? There are huge costs involved in building the infrastructure to connect everyones devices together. Sure you can have ad-hoc networks to connect physically close groups together, but intercity and international links dont work that way. Someone has to own and pay for the backbones, servers and all other required infrastructure. There is no buisness model for this to work, and the world revolves around buisness models.