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LTE Upgrade Will Let Phones Connect To Nearby Devices Without Towers

Posted by Soulskill on from the just-yell-really-loud dept.

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from MIT's Technology Review: A new feature being added to the LTE protocol that smartphones use to communicate with cellular towers will make it possible to bypass those towers altogether. Phones will be able to "talk" directly to other mobile devices and to beacons located in shops and other businesses. Known as LTE Direct, the wireless technology has a range of up to 500 meters, far more than either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. It is included in update to the LTE standard slated for approval this year, and devices capable of LTE Direct could appear as soon as late 2015. ... Researchers are, for example, testing LTE Direct as a way to allow smartphones to automatically discover nearby people, businesses, and other information.

9 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. Privacy implications? by whoever57 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What's in this for the NSA, FBI and other LEO?

    Will the phone owner be able to turn it off?

    --
    The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
  2. They've reinvented CB radio! by Ozoner · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Once there was private peer-to-peer radio. It was called "Ham Radio". But the companies couldn't charge for it, so they made the radios always work through their base stations and called it "Cellular Radio". And of course they removed the peer-to-peer function.

    But wait, now it's back! (in a way that can be monetised of course).

    1. Re:They've reinvented CB radio! by arielCo · · Score: 4, Informative

      Only it's full-duplex, spread-spectrum, and allows many separate, invite-only, multiparty conversations. Besides that, no improvement here.

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      This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
    2. Re:They've reinvented CB radio! by satsuke · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Ham radio (well, packet ax25) is/was so slow that any kind of peer to peer exchange would be almost worthless by modern standards.

      1200/9600baud is fine for station to station packet, but again, worthless for anything more modern.

      Also, the cellular network interfaces with the PSTN, something HAM could technically do, but with a ton of restrictions on content and open to anyone to listen to.

      ham radio has a good place in the toolkit in terms of emergency communications, but only than and only in small pieces until the cell networks recover.

  3. Re:How much is that doggy in the window? (song lin by epyT-R · · Score: 5, Informative

    peer to peer communication during extended blackouts? File transfer? gaming? video chat?

  4. Re:How much is that doggy in the window? (song lin by Zynder · · Score: 5, Funny

    As if that matters! Have you seen a lawn full of teenagers? They'll talk about one thing while texting the same person about another. They also keep trampling my azaleas...

  5. Re:How much is that doggy in the window? (song lin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    500 meters in a terremote, or other disaster, could be a long perilous walk, and LTE Direct could save lives.

  6. Firechat app in Hong Kong. Now. by 12WTF$ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Right now, this is happening in Hong Kong:

    In Hong Kong, pro-democracy demonstrators are looking for new ways to communicate.

    News about the protests in Hong Kong have been suppressed in mainland China, where the picture sharing site Instagram has been blocked. Messages posted to Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site similar to Twitter, are being blocked in far greater numbers than normal. And on Sunday, rumours reportedly circulated that the authorities in Hong Kong might shut down the city's cellular networks.

    In response, a different type of social network has come to the fore. The Firechat app allows smartphone users to talk to one another "off-the-grid", in the absence of a mobile signal or access to the internet. By making use of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, messages are spread in a daisy chain fashion, jumping from one user to the next. The system is particularly effective when large numbers of people are congregated together - like at a music festival, or a political protest.

    Micha Benoliel, CEO of Open Garden, the firm that makes the app, tells BBC Trending there has been a huge surge in downloads from Hong Kong, as more than 100,000 new accounts have been created in less than 24 hours. Usage spiked during protests in Taiwan and Iran earlier this year, but never before on this scale, says Benoliel.

    Inside the app discussions are arranged either according to theme, or how close you are to other users. At one point on Sunday 33,000 people in Hong Kong were using the app at the same time.

    Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-...

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  7. Re:How much is that doggy in the window? (song lin by jareth-0205 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yes, because p2p comm during extended blackouts is trivially easy to maintain in the face of depleting battery power (Also, extended blackouts are oh-so-common in modern life). File transfers? Don't we already have a tech called bluetooth for that?

    Fucking luddites on a tech site.

    Yes, we have wifi, and bluetooth, and whatever, but LTE could be a technology to rule them all. Imagine having one protocol that could scale from pico home sites to nationwide networks. Having your phone connected to a home LTE hotspot that sits on your free fast wired internet connection, that then seemlessly hands over when you leave the house to standard mobile comms, or does P2P when you're physically near someone and need a photo or video from their device. We could do away with a whole bunch of different technologies potentially and replace them with one overarching wireless protocol that is better than them all.