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.'"

Comments

Meme redux

[minvaren]

So given the disruptive effect on the cell data network this would have, would it be more apt to call it a Grendel cluster?

Re:like BitTorrent

[IndustrialComplex]

But it lets users abuse the network

Bittorrent?

I like to abuse my network by complaining how slow it is to responding to my requests for pictures of sandwiches and how much space its old equipment takes up. I always threaten to keep it off the surge protector or knock it off the shelf so I can get a nice new slim model with all the bells and whistles.