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."

Comments

Not exponentially

[f97tosc]

... but network effects mean that the number of connections in a heavily populated mesh grow exponentially. No, quadratically with the number of phones.

Re:Privacy Concerns Anyone?

[JoshRosenbaum]

I know people will say, "Well, we'll encrypt the message", but when my phone is a man in the middle, good luck transfering the key without me finding a way to get it.

You wouldn't use a single key for this. You'd use public/private keys. It doesn't matter if you're in the middle using public/private keys. An easy example is https which is ssl over http. There are plenty of points that are traveled through, but it's always encrypted.

Read about public key crypto here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography