The Grid, Our Cars, and the Net

Wired is running a piece on the big idea of Robin Chase — the founder of Zipcar — that we need to build our smart power grid on open standards and include cars as nodes in a mesh network. "'Today in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers and tanks and airplanes are running around using mesh networks,' said Chase. 'It works, it's secure, it's robust. If a node or device disappears, the network just reroutes the data.' And, perhaps most important, it's in motion. ... Build a smart electrical grid that uses Internet protocols and puts a mesh network device in every structure that has an electric meter. Sweep out the half dozen networks in our cars and replace them with an open, Internet-based platform. Add a mesh router. A nationwide mesh cloud will form, linking vehicles that can connect with one another and with the rest of the network. It's cooperative gain gone national, gone mobile, gone open."

Comments

Too much to lose

[shogun]

Big ISPs and phone companies have too much to lose to allow this to ever happen.

It would be too hard to be tapped by various 3 letter government agencies so they wouldn't like it either.

Sure, but

[g-to-the-o-to-the-g]

Maybe instead of continuing to focus on the dinosaur that is the automobile, more effort should be put into building very a efficient mass transit infrastructure. Just a thought.

Re:One thing of note

[Anonymous Coward]

And why you'd mount it on a car, I'm not sure: the car itself doesn't have too much data to transmit

Some ideas:

• car in front to the car behind: I hit the breaks, and am coming to a sudden halt. Break now, or you'll hit me;
• car behind to car in front: I'm accelerating and taking you over. Don't change lanes;
• car to other cars on the road: my tires lost grip at [GPS coordinates]. Forward to other cars that road is slippery there;
• car to the police: I've been in an accident at [GPS coordinates]. My driver's vital signs are fluctuating.

And for some privacy nightmare:

• I think my driver is drunk. I'd better call the cops

Re:"Only those with something to hide..."

[swillden]

It is true. Phones are NEVER off, they are in sleep mode.

If by "sleep mode" you mean:

• Radio turned off (send and receive)
• CPU turned off
• GPS turned off
• Camera turned off
• DRAM refresh turned off (RAM state decays to garbage)
• Tiny trickle of power through the power button and the set of relays within the CPU that sense the powerup signal.

The most important bit there, of course, is "radio turned off". If the radio weren't off, your battery would go dead in a matter of days even when the phone is off, just as it does when the phone is on. It might last a couple days longer off than on, but that's all.

Since that doesn't happen -- turn the phone off with a full battery and turn it on a month later and you'll still have most of a full charge -- that means the radio is off. And if the radio is off, then the FBI can't send your phone any signals telling it to turn anything on.

The CPU being off and the RAM refresh off, by the way, are the reasons that when you turn your phone on it takes anywhere from 20 to 60 seconds to become functional. It's gotta boot.