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Swedish Company Trials Peer-to-Peer Cellphones
Dr_Barnowl writes "A company named TerraNet is going through a trial period for a p2p based mobile telephony system. Phones are used to route calls onto other phones, constructing mesh networks of 'up to 20km'. The BBC reports on the natural tendency of the big telecoms providers to want to squash this. I can see other problems though. The advantages in an environment with sparse cell coverage are obvious, but network effects mean that the number of connections in a heavily populated mesh grow exponentially. What happens to your battery life when your phone becomes a node? And while the company is optimistic that they have a viable technology model from IP licensing, the demand for devices supporting this is going to be proportional to the number of devices that it can connect you to."
This brings to mind some major privacy concerns too. Who besides me doesn't want my conversation getting routed through someone else's phone?
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
If your phone is a node how easy would it be to listen in on conversations compared to how the phone systems currently work?
If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.
... but network effects mean that the number of connections in a heavily populated mesh grow exponentially. No, quadratically with the number of phones.welcome our bandwith using, cell phone peering overlords.
The problem is that the phones need to connect to a base station in order for the service providers to calculate how much usage you've sucked up. If you were able to make calls from one phone to another without getting routed through the existing cell network, you'd be able to make calls for free, in essence.
As long as you have strict management of radio frequencies, these phones will never become available to the public.
I can't even begin to think about how stupid an idea this is. Just imagine the police deploying a thousand mobile phones across a city to trace every single call.
Obviously the battery will be drained to zero in the blink of an eye, possibly dieing a violent, flaming death if enough energy was stored the moment you switched on the phone. Thankfully, your investigative question posed in TFS alerted their engineers to the problem so they can start working around this problem. Then again, maybe they were already aware of the problem and resorted to the wonderful method of self-regulating systems. The more cell phones burn up, the less dense the network will be. A beatiful design indeed.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
With every text message being based on text messages sent by other users, here is your average p2p text message:
lol omg wtf roflmao bff jill bff jill bff jill
It's an effective way to make sure your messages are completely devoid of any content.
I've been studying mesh networks, including Internet-based ones such as peercast networks, for quite some time. A few things to consider:
1. The strength of nodes you can connect to should be based on their strength versus others. Strength should be rated by uplink connection speed (is one node connected to the web versus other nodes connected only to other nodes?), power availability (is one node connected to a power supply verses a battery?), recent packet loss history and recent downtime history.
2. Node saturation: if a node with a lower network latency oversaturated? Connect to a less saturated, higher latency node.
3. Data needs: are you sending voice/video or data? Real-time connections should take precedence over data, of course.
The problem is way more complicated than it seems. For me, a perfect mesh/peercast network would allow data to navigate based on need as well as navigate to those who are the strongest nodes. Do current mesh networks consider these ideas? As far as I know, many of them don't.
And then of course, we won't be seeing it state side: CALEA support would likely be impossible.
Dominant Meme
I'd give it a year after this implemented and people will be routinely sharing music over this system.
Then there will be uproar from the music police, and they will insist on such draconian anti piracy measures that the technology will become all but unusable.
Or am I being pessimistic.
Concerning the author's comment on battery life, could one potentially recycle an old phone to act as a node in this network? Seems many of us get a new one every few years anyway.
If you can find a way to add privacy, then this could be a great way to return power to consumers and stick it to the man. Or at least have some leverage in convincing major companies to act more consume-friendly. I for one want to see lower prices and the end of the long-distance tax we have now.
It wants its party line technology back.
My grandparents in rural Kansas had party lines, but that's because they were in a remote area. How exactly is this going to add value to the cellular phone?
Other than the unpredictable reliability of mesh density required to get service, that battery cost is a certain problem.
But if their routing protocol includes battery costs, so battery wear across the whole network is evened, then that problem could be alleviated. It might even offer a way for people to be compensated for contributing to the network, perhaps just by keeping their phone recharged. Getting power to the towers is probably the biggest infrastructure problem, especially in rural areas. If that doesn't also mean peers are too sparse for a reliable network (including batteries finally dying), then this tech could be worth the hassles getting it up and running.
Especially for temporary deployments where there usually aren't any people to justify a permanent infrastructure. Exploration/camping trips, rural festival concerts, rescue operations, warfare, ocean fleets... there are many niches. Including the initial infrastructure for crews building the permanent infrastructure, before permanent cells are online.
--
make install -not war
I would like to see a p2p wifi network, but not neccessarily on portable phones first, but instead on home computers. You'd think that scenario would be easier to create, maintain, and depend upon, but I guess the demand isn't there yet. I'm thinking the driver for such a change might come from a lack of net neutrality, where people are not only throttled in their communications, but cut off entirely.
I am tired of my cell phone provider myself, mainly because of contracts and hidden fees/costs.
Put a GPS receiver in each phone, then send location statistics with each call. The company will rapidly discover the optimum positions to place central nodes, reducing the need for phone-based relaying except in fringe areas.
That and have lots of fun data to send to the NSA...
Dr_Barnowl is apparently leaving his scientific method behind when he makes assumptions about whether these things are viable. The "proof is in the pudding," as they say. The final judgment of this cell-mesh is: does it work?
p2p, huh? Stealing minutes from the phone company now! When will those kids ever learn?!
a couple decades ago there was a lot of DARPA research into autonomous routing and re-configuration in support of then-called 'packet radio' networks.
:-)
It doesn't seem like much more than VoIP over a ham packet radio network, only without having to be a geek to use it
I am so sick of everyone one being oh so concerned about identity theft. I want to see some statistics. I am willing to bet the threat is severely overblown like terrorism. It's just something to upset people. Have you ever had your computer hacked into? Or do you only have second hand stories? I think a bigger problem is changing my passwords endlessly. I hate it!
How much power would be consumed routing someone elses's calls? I wouldnt want to pick up my phone to dial a call only to realise that Im nearly out of battery simply because my phone was getting drained routing calls during a busy period? I assume they have taken power optimizations into consideration ?
What about security? Could someone not create a node with their phone and basically listen in on conversations that are routed through it? Or do they segment the traffic and split it up among multiple peers so that you only get bits and pieces of any one conversation through any one node?
Please, oh, please, Apple. Do not put this feature into my iPhone. I already have 20 minutes of battery life as it is.
What on earth makes you think other people would want to listen to your phone conversations? Do you hold nuclear security codes? I guess credit card numbers are a concern but perhaps you could turn off the mesh feature when making calls which relay important info.
You already have PTT mode Stateside. A mesh is just a more complicated version of the same thing.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Basically you would have a network that is just too plain slow.
Also there are networks that exist that are similar to the wifi network you are describing. Look at the "dark" networks like tor and see how that goes. People don't rely on them for their speed.
IIRC, iDEN PTT works through the BSS, which is both the very antithesis of a mesh, and an easy entry point for CALEA.
Or am I missing something?
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
In the future every device will be part of a wireless mesh network, both acting as a server and client, make it 802 compliant and you have an awesome platform. There is a chicken and egg problem though, enough users need to have devices in order for the network to work, and most people won't want the device unless there are enough to support a reliable network. Piggy backing onto current cell and wireless networks is the way to solve this, relying on them when you don't have enough nodes to connect to, when the device market reaches critical mass, then everything is using the mesh network, cameras, printers, phones, pdas, laptops, gps, computers, cars, packages, to name a few.
Imagine taking a picture on vacation, then sending it to print on your moms printer in another state a few seconds after it was taken, or taking pictures then having them automatically uploaded to your flicker account and stored on on your personal computer. Once everything is networked it will change how we do and store a lot of things. Mobile devices won't need mass storage, you can stream video and audio from your personal server from home.
The only people not on the mesh will be people in rural areas and will need to rely on a wireless service. This will be a great period for the internet as no company or government will be a gatekeeper, only content and consumption will matter.
Yes, you are missing IMHO, QED, KISS, and IANATE (I am not a telecom engineer). There are several words in your message which could have been compressed more for optimal mesh sending. :)
Yes, the stability of the mesh is important.
But, it doesn' have to comepte with land lines (which ARE stable)... as much as it has to compete with regular wireless services (which ARE NOT STABLE).
Most of the discussion about reliablity makes it seem as though the existing wireless services are "all-that".
It would be first huge network using new architecture. They would control every nodes in the network, at least on production level, so they can use network coding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_coding
We're talking about cell phones. You're out in public talking with 100 people around you and you're worried about privacy?!! If you want privacy wait until you get home.
I do care about having the option of complete privacy, but 99.9% of the time I don't really care at all. My phone conversations would be pretty boring to strangers. If it were socially acceptable would you listen to the phone conversations of strangers? More then a few times out of curiosity? I am guessing that for most people the answer is no.
Because phones are much closer to each other than telecom towers, and the energy to transmit goes up quadratically with the distance, I think there is no issue of the batteries dying in a blink. However, when you're on the road (driving), you may not be in touch with enough other phones, and the connection may suck.
Bert
The scaling laws relating to battery power cited in the article are off. Power use per capita is driven by packet rate through one's phone times the power required to relay the packet. As density increases, power drops off with a square law while the number of packets per capita doesn't increase linearly, nor even quadratically, let alone exponentially, just because the population density increases. Indeed, given that human interaction is more direct the more dense the population, there is reason to believe that the packets per capita may go down with population density.
Seastead this.
...you too are talking out of your ass, while insisting others have their head shoved up their own. IRC, Skype and AIM are *all* capable of direct connections between users (and indeed at least in Skype, this is the default), with connection and routing through the central server only during the setup of the call. AIM: http://reaim.sourceforge.net/dcc.html Skype: http://saikat.guha.cc/pub/iptps06-skype/ IRC: http://www.livinginternet.com/r/ra_dcc.htm
One of the problems with wireless grid networks is the latency involved. Having towers makes for much lower latency. The idea of a call being routed 100km over a grid where the nodes have a max range of 1km is crazy. That's a couple of hundred possible points of failure. The quality just won't be acceptable.
But what about keeping the towers and just using a grid to connect the nodes that are a little out of range. Now that calls just have to traverse the grid to get to the nearest tower. Potential for error is greatly reduced along with latency.
Areas with an existing infrastructure would benefit even though there is already full coverage. When one has a poor connection (say, in a basement building) the phone could opt to use the grid to get the message out and to the tower. Overall quality of service would increase.
Areas without an infrastructure would benefit by requiring fewer towers. The more towers the better the quality of service - but for many areas just getting service is the main concern. In such areas only minimal infrastructure would be required. Additional infrastructure could be added in the future should they want to increase the quality of service.
In addition, localization (ie, 911) and content monitoring are only minimally effected by such a system. Believe it or not, this is actually a good thing for most people.
Just an idea,
Willy
Seems like one obvious use for a system like this would be in emergency response services, where you'd want a phone infrastructure that doesn't depend on any towers being in place. If you had a fleet of these phones to start handing out (or, heck, turning on and dropping in various places to act as nodes) after something like a Katrina, you'd be able to coordinate large numbers of responders without having to have the cell network back online first.
TITLE: Method, system and device for improving the energy efficiency within p2p cellular phone systems PROBLEM: In p2p cellular phone systems the limited energy storage capacity within cellular phone batteries can limit the usefulness of such systems system. If the cellular phone users allow their cellular phones to be used in transmitting other users cellular phone calls, the energy stored into the batteries of those transmitting cellular phones would be harmfully consumed during the transmission of other peoples cellular phone calls. The consumption of energy reduces the battery life, forcing the transmitting cellular phone's battery to be needed to be charged more often. In addition, there might be harmful side-effects associated with being extensively exposed to a presence of transmitting cellular phones
SOLUTION: The innovation presented here, eliminates most of the problems associated with consuming the limited energy from the batteries of those call transmitting cellular phones. In addition, the hereby presented innovation limits the amount of electro-magnetic radiation that the users of p2p cellular phone systems would otherwise be adsorbing.
According to this invention users of p2p cellular phone system could use for example their old cell phones to act as a private base stations and thereby solve much of the power consumption problem. A single such 'base station' could transmit hundreds of call every day while being permanently 'forgotten' into loading the battery from the wall. If that old cell phone is forgotten to be permanently charged on a roof top, the system has a true private base station. However the other nodes, within the p2p cellular phone system, would need to be informed about those certain 'permanently charging' cellular phone nodes. According to this invention those 'charging nodes' do send a signal to other nodes that distinguishes those 'permanently charging' cellular phones apart from those currently non-charging nodes.
(PATENT BUSTER) claim: A method system and a system device facilitating the energy efficient usage of a p2p cellular phone system, wherein those wireless communication devices that are currently having their batteries electrically charged, using a wall plug or comparable energy sources, can give a specific signal to other wireless nodes, indicating their practically endless resource of electric energy, so that the other wireless nodes could prefer routing the cellular phone calls at least partially through that node with practically endless availability of electric energy. Dear all reading professional, you are served
This is one of the greatest ideas I've heard in a long time. If you've ever been caught in a disaster (like 9/11, for example), you know that right away virtually all land lines and cell phones become unusable because the switching circuits are immediately overloaded. This is due to the centralized model, where the switching systems are designed to handle slightly more than average loads, and can't handle more. By distributing the call network, it would dramatically reduce the bottleneck problem, making it much more likely that your calls would get through. Then add the other advantages mentioned and you have a solution to several very real problems.
There are a bunch of technical details that would have to be solved, but those have known solutions that will only get easier with time. Cell phones are getting more powerful all the time, and most people are not on the phone much of the time, so the device has lots of bandwidth that could be better used. Encryption can be done end-to-end with the available compute power. The battery power usage may actually be improved by the reduced power necessary to make calls that are shorter distance. Bandwidth congestion would be reduced because of the locality of transmission. It would be easy to drop repeaters in strategic locations if that helps long distance connectivity; that would be a lot cheaper than having to put cell towers *everywhere*.
This is an architectural idea that from a technical point of view is almost a no-brainer; it is great!
The problems are going to be business and political ones, because it bypasses existing centralized power structures. The switching companies will see their lives flashing before their eyes, and the government will not have central points to wire tap. These factions currently control all the infrastructure, and they will not want a revolutionary change like this to happen.
Maybe a way to get this going is for determined, maverick companies to do it fast enough that the big boys are caught off guard, and don't respond quickly enough. Also, the new business infrastructure needs to eliminate any central points of control (like a single critical vendor) that could be shutdown by the powers that be when they wake up.
One example might be an open source hardware/software effort that implements the devices. If a critical mass of phones gets out there quickly enough that are not dependent on the existing infrastructure, perhaps it could work. If a company (Google?) comes out with an open phone architecture which supports this as a third-party app while simultaneously working with the existing cell phone infrastructure, it could hit like wildfire.
The only significant obstacle I can see is that the carrier spectrum is still a centrally controlled resource. It is possible that the govt would simply outlaw the usage of spectrum for these purposes. If someone can figure out how to tie this new capability in with existing spectrum allocations that have the necessary distance and bandwidth properties in such a way that you couldn't disallow it without disallowing other necessary functions, that would be interesting.
yep -ricochet did this in the late 90s:
.com crash
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(internet_service)
it was an idea that was slightly ahead of its time, plus they were a victim of the rise in broadband and the
so maybe this new implementation will succeed if it is able to gain critical mass -the idea of the handsets extending the mesh by acting as repeaters is cool...Ricochet never got faster than 128kbps, but that is all the fast that my ATT EDGE connection will go.....
-I'm just sayin'
Things like that.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
If that means sever traffic jam, then this is not going to be allowed to replace the current network.
Cause they ain't exactly cells anymore are they?
Were that I say, pancakes?
i believe they call it a 2 way radio?
For example in Finland there is already such network for authorities. Police, rescue teams, army and border patrol teams are using network called VIRVE. It is secured network and all handsets can act as a repeater and then connect to base stations. It is using TETRA technology.
This is what happens when somebody works on an idea you had, and began implementing, years ago http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=232451&cid=18910747/
That aside, how do they manage to push wireless to 2000m with these things http://www.terranet.se/index.php?option=com_content&task=category§ionid=8&id=17&Itemid=62.
Dammit. I knew I should have continued
.
There are no billable minutes, since your not using the cell phone networks infrastructure, in the same way you are not billed for using your walkie-talkie.