{"id":2115,"date":"2010-07-14T16:33:00","date_gmt":"2010-07-14T21:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=2115"},"modified":"2010-07-18T15:45:01","modified_gmt":"2010-07-18T20:45:01","slug":"the-doom-of-the-telecomms-carriers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=2115","title":{"rendered":"The doom of the telecomms carriers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Forward-thinking technologists, including me, have been predicting for some time that adaptive mesh networking would be the doom of the telecomms-carrier and broadband oligopoly. Now comes a scientist from Australia with an idea so diabolically clever that I&#8217;m annoyed with myself for not thinking of it sooner: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.physorg.com\/news198298057.html\">put the mesh networking in smartphones!<\/a><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>For those who came in late, &#8220;adaptive mesh network&#8221; is shorthand for a way to do Internet everywhere by building cheap wireless Internet routers that communicate over unlicensed radio spectrum and self-organize by handshaking with their neighbors.  Such a network can relatively easily be engineered to autoconfigure and heal itself against point failures.   <\/p>\n<p>In Dr. Gardner&#8217;s scheme, smartphones equipped with adaptive-mesh hardware and software take the place of the dedicated mesh nodes everyone else has been imagining.  Here&#8217;s what makes this diabolically clever:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>By pitching it as a backup in case a power outage or disaster takes out cellphone towers, Dr. Gardner makes it an easy political sell and hard for the carriers to oppose.  Regulators might even mandate it as a way to solve the 911 problem!<\/li>\n<li>Smartphones already have to have most of this capability anyway; adding one more frequency band and adaptive-routing software is no big deal.<\/li>\n<li>The scheme amortizes the cost of the mesh support across the smartphone vendors&#8217; <em>huge<\/em> production runs, lowering cost per unit way past anything achievable for dedicated mesh nodes.<\/li>\n<li>Very clever attack on the power-distribution problem; people will solve it every day because they want to keep their individual phones running!<\/li>\n<li>This mesh would be self-deploying; instead of fixed node locations, it goes where the users are.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There would still be a place for fixed-location mesh nodes as a backhaul network to increase aggregate bandwidth and service reliability.  And they&#8217;d get much cheaper, because cellphone production volumes would pull the cost of the repeater hardware down to zip.  People would buy sixpacks of booster nodes at supermarkets; banks would give them away like they do calculators now.  <\/p>\n<p>This idea is <em>beautiful<\/em>.  It is made of goodness and winnitude.  It&#8217;s technically feasible, should be politically viable, and gets on the right side of economics of production scale.  Hey, Google!   Want to <em>really<\/em> undermine the bandwidth monopolists?   Throw some funding at this guy <em>now<\/em> &#8211; better yet, hire him and put the mesh support into Android!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Forward-thinking technologists, including me, have been predicting for some time that adaptive mesh networking would be the doom of the telecomms-carrier and broadband oligopoly. Now comes a scientist from Australia with an idea so diabolically clever that I&#8217;m annoyed with myself for not thinking of it sooner: put the mesh networking in smartphones!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2115"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2151,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2115\/revisions\/2151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}