Cool-Tether Links Phones' Bandwidth To Make High-Speed Hotspots

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 1, 2009 @02:04AM from the broadish-band dept.

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.'"

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Re:like BitTorrent by kazade84 · 2009-12-01 02:15 · Score: 4, Interesting

I was actually thinking of something like this yesterday. With the rapid increase in Wifi + Internet enabled phones and devices, it could be possible to actually have an entirely distributed network just by linking together devices in range.
Perhaps that's where we should build the Internet 2, now governments around the world are doing everything they can to control the first one. :)