Things that might not happen: cellphones

[dsrtao]

iPhones have 802.11foobarg transceivers, in addition to their cell radios. And they have Bluetooth radios as well. Lots of nifty phones have these three, and it's plausible to assume that a majority of phones will have them by, say, 2010 or 11 or so.

With just a tiny bit more smarts, these phones can act as mesh routers. Given a nominal 80 foot range for 20Mb/s of throughput, most office buildings and city streets at rush hour will have huge capacities available.

T-Mobile now offers (and there is no reason not to think that other carriers won't follow them) a cellplan including free connectivity when your phone uses an 802.11foobarg connection instead of the cell. And unlimited data plans run about $20/month as an add-on.

Carriers, of course, won't like this. But for everyone else, it's a win.

Oh, and the OpenMoko phone (dev version now, consumer in the fall) will run Linux and has the 802.11foobarg and GSM cell radios necessary to do all this.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Hmm. How hard is it to implant a parasitic network inside this network, and use it for my own nefarious purposes?

[jducoeur]

Well, given that it's extremely easy to do so with WiFi currently, I suspect not very hard. End-to-end encryption is going to be crucial with mesh networking, and there probably needs to be a lot of evolution on anti-phishing measures...

[n2mlq.livejournal.com]

just remember grasshopper, that the protocol spoken by the UMA phones is actually GSM tunneled in IP. Not very useful without SS.7 behind it.

[jducoeur]

The problem, of course, is critical mass. For this to work, you need to get enough phones cooperating in a single area. That's probably only going to happen if everyone agrees on common interoperability standards that ordinary phones run on. It's hard to see that arising from the current situation, unless someone comes up with a killer app that demands it, or regulatory intervention occurs...