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

But, but.......

[endeavour31]

Everyone here knows Microsoft cannot innovate!

Re:like BitTorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Good job

[HangingChad]

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