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Cool-Tether Links Phones' Bandwidth To Make High-Speed Hotspots
Barence writes "Microsoft Research has found a novel way of beating the deplorably slow speeds of mobile broadband, by combining several phones together to make one high-speed hotspot. Dubbed Cool-Tether, the system harnesses the mobile data connection of multiple mobile handsets to build an on-the-fly Wi-Fi hotspot. 'To address the challenges of energy efficiency, Cool-Tether carefully optimises the energy drain of the WAN (GPRS/EDGE/3G) and Wi-Fi radios on smartphones,' Microsoft's research paper claims. 'We prototype Cool-Tether on smartphones and, experimentally, demonstrate savings in energy consumption between 38%-71% compared to prior energy-agnostic solutions.'"
a novel way of beating the deplorably slow speeds of mobile broadband, by combining several phones together to make one high-speed hotspot.
Mobile operators will just love this! Considering the cell towers can be a bit slow already and especially so when many people are using them for internet, this will not magically provide better speed off it. But it lets users abuse the network same way that BitTorrent does - hammer the network so much that you get more while others suffer.
While operators already have unlimited 3G for cheap (not in USA, so they actually are unlimited), the only way slow speeds of mobile broadband is going to improve is to push for new technologies and make the operators improve their network. But not that 3G's 5Mbps would be that slow anyway.
Seriously, which mobile provider, at least in the US would support this? Most already don't like you tethering. I can't imagine their reaction to multiple customers pooling their services together to take full advantage of their mobile broadband.
So given the disruptive effect on the cell data network this would have, would it be more apt to call it a Grendel cluster?
Big! Strong! Wow! Tada-O!
when someone figures out a way to create a swarm of zombie phones using this technology.
body massage!
rename it to sweet-tether. this way users aren't expecting their phones to be colder when using the service. but i do think that it is a very rad move using hot names that jive with today's lingo.
Everyone here knows Microsoft cannot innovate!
so when will they release this for Cydia?
The system is most likely to be harnessed in developing nations such as India, where mobile internet is far more prevalent than fixed-line access.
So, the system is aimed at applications where GPRS/EDGE/3G speeds are not sufficient but there is no access to power lines, and there are several phones to mitigate the speed problem? Like, I don't know, team of computer pirates torrenting while on the move to be hard to locate? Or live TV broadcasting?
I mean, usually if you have several smartphones at hand, and a computer with a job that requires network speed exceeding 3G, you often have some sockets to plug the chargers in...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
A mesh network seems like a great idea. But how do you do it in a consumer version? What we need is a cheap box that someone can plug in and forget. With one based on 802.11g or n you're talking a couple hundred feet of coverage, if you're lucky. The bare minimum for a system needs to be a few thousand feet or more if you truly want to create a city wide network independent of a residential ISP.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Way to innovate MS! JoikuBoost: "JoikuBoost joins multiple 3G connections from mobile phones and operator networks into one larger unified and shared bit pipe, accessible over WiFi from e.g. laptops."
Who wants to bet they'll get the patent anyway ?
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Implement this as an ssh worm for jailbroken iPhones and we have a world wide free WiFi network. Thanks Microsoft!
...or just someone else's?
Are you kidding? I've been doing this for about a year now using Mikrotik routers and either multiple ADSL connections or multiple 3G connections.
It's simply (ok maybe not so simply) a case of setting up routing and mangling rules so that *new* connections outbound are sent round-robin and all connections inbound are always responded to over the original link.
This method requires no support from the upstream provider and can use as many connections as required.
Deplorably slow? HSDPA is already faster than most people's broadband. Seems like a solution looking for a problem to me...
With all those phones running, I would imagine them running anything but cool.
You get this kind of thing out of the box on Linux: just plug in multiple phones and configure multiple internet connections; you get load balancing, on-demand dialing, and all that for free. Linux got this support years ago for dial-up modems, but mobiles phones look like dial-up modems to Linux anyway. It's not usually done with cell phones because it's expensive (that's why there's no simple UI for configuring it), but it's well documented and pretty easy to set up.
(Of course, with Windows and WinMo, it may actually be rocket science.)
Microsoft Research has found a novel way of beating the deplorably slow speeds of mobile broadband...
Good job, research division. Now reluctantly hand it over to marketing which will:
- Tie it to Windows Mobile
- Cripple it to only work with Hotmail and Bing
- Junk it up with "partner channels"
- Drag out deployment long enough for Apple to be able to field something smaller, cooler and 5x more expensive six months ahead
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I'm actually curious how you combine the speeds from multiple devices which use the same gateway to get a single faster connection. Doesn't this thing normally require seperate gateways per connection?
The other way to get around this is to have 2 routers working for you doing basically the same thing, but the speedup is only between those two routers. To get faster internet speeds I'm pretty sure separate gateways are needed. Do they get around this ?
http://lartc.org/lartc.html#LARTC.LOADSHARE
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
savings in energy consumption between 38%-71% compared to prior energy-agnostic solutions
This strikes me as hubris (at least a little). While TFA talks about throttling down power usage, we're talking about doing this with multiple components being replicated (CPUs, maybe WiFi receivers, connectivity between phones, etc.).
Well, nothing prevents you from using several phone each using *a different* operator.
Thus you're not eating up more "user slots" than the average user, but spreading your bandwidth across several towers of several operators.
And the bittorrent problem is more linked to shitty service providers who attempts to oversell more bandwidth that they actually have and then come back crying when the users start attempting to use their connections as advertised.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Please don't take my bandwidth away Microsoft,I need it.
The same brilliant minds that brought us Microsoft Songsmith.
I'm an academic and I actually have to sift through bullshit like this to get to the real research, and it's quite frustrating.
As usual, they choose to address things readers will find interesting and leave out important details. Here's a few pseudo-equations for you:
PowerRequired(802.11) < Power(3G).
PowerRequired(3G x N phones) >> PowerRequired(One 802.11 AP).
SpeedAndReliability(One 802.11 AP) > SpeedAndReliability(3G x N phones (N < 20 probably)).
And most importantly:
Cost(N tethered phones) >>>>> Any reasonable price.
Here's a tip to Microsoft Research: try doing some research first.
* IAAANR. (I am an annoyed network researcher.)
I did this for Cradlepoint 2 years ago. We call it "Load Balancing". Plus, instead of just cellphones, you can use almost any 3G modem and WiMax device. It also has the capability to balance with the wire. It's funny that this took 3 to 5 year for Microsoft to develop. I did it in 2 months.
attach to multiple free wifi hotspot I see from my room ...
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
It's not the bandwidth. It's the latency.
Ping on a cell connection runs around 200 ms, in my experience. *That's* the part that makes tethering suck -- with pages requiring dozens of images and javascript files these days, waiting for a 200ms round trip for each request adds up FAST.
I can see it now, people will buy phones to make instant WiFi access to download illegal stuff, and then kill it as quick as it was created, leaving little tracebility to who downloaded what. And this could then put people at risk for being responsible for illegal downloads that they may not have actually had a hand in.
Just a what if thought...
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Microsoft Research is an awesome entity that produces a ton of cool things. Have you ever poked around on their website? It's got a ton of cool projects like this one. I wouldn't get your hopes of ever seeing this turn into a real product - just because somebody in MS Research is working on it doesn't mean that Microsoft has any plans to use it for anything. I'm convinced that the primary purpose of MS Research is to employ people so that they don't go work for Microsoft's competitors.
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
Using bandwidth that you have PAID for is not abuse. A company overselling their capacity or promising more bandwidth than they provide is fraud however.
You might want to read your contract and TOS.
If you are paying the mass market price for broadband you are paying for speeds "up to" some limit.
When and as available.
Western Union - a century or so back - printed a disclaimer on the top of every ordinary telegraph form that promised nothing more than a good faith attempt at prompt and accurate delivery.
The more things change...
I actually worked on a system like this for my thesis at UCL (London) along with 3 other group members. We used USB dongles connected to laptops which combined their 3G bandwidths and offered it through a WiFi access point located on one of the laptops. We actually did manage to aggregate bandwidth and offer the sum of what was individually available. However, our solution was not polished as we had to complete the project in about 4 months. But it did work :)
Hardly innovative - it's basically load-balancing multiple cellular connections and making it available with a WiFi access point. I could do that right now with a Linux (maybe pfSense?) box (I think about it every time my shit ADSL connection goes out, but of course a setup like this would be horrendously expensive). It's also nearly same idea as the "wifi mega-snarfer" concept that's been around for ages - except this uses multiple cell connections instead of multiple unsecured wifi access points. The power management is cool but nothing groundbreaking - power management is a blatanty obvious issue when running on battery power.
I'll admit it's surprisingly un-corporate and not-vanilla for Microsoft though.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You can, but you'll either need a separate PC loaded up with network adapters acting as a router or you'll have to jam WiFi adapters into every orifice of your current computer. Look up load-balancing under Linux, and pfSense.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel