Two views of telephony futures…
by Imran Ali
A pair of recent articles run by the BBC and the New York Times respectively shed light on a pair of innovations that may profoundly affect mobile communication and infrastructure in coming years…
Though mesh networking applied to mobile telephony has long been a promising area of research, with projects such as MIT’s Roofnet and Dublin’s WAND, Terranet are possibly the first to bring ad-hoc , wireless mesh networking to mobile telephony.
Inspired by poor cell coverage during visits to Africa, handsets modified with Terranet software can locate nearby cellphones and route calls, handset-to-handset, until the they reach their destination.
Though currently, I believe, confined to voice, it’s not difficult to envisage a future where voice, data, and messages can jump from phone to phone using the most available or appropriate network; whether Bluetooth, Wifi, WiMax, UWB or plain old GSM.
Though not the replacement for GSM that Terranet’s Anders Carlius suggests, it’s a useful compliment to existing mobile technology, particularly for areas with low to no mobile coverage and if Terranet can bring its technology to near ubiquity.
On a related note, the NYT’s coverage of Software Defined Radio this weekend raises some important questions about base station and indeed handset technology. SDR’s fast becoming a mobile wet dream, enabling handsets to potentially support any radio standards simply by applying software updates.
Coupled with mesh networking, it becomes possible to imagine mobile messaging and communications being routed across multiple radio networks, handsets and base stations, potentially improving resilience, availability and coverage for all types of mobile communication.
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Read the NYT’s coverage of SDR here and the BBC’s piece on Terranet here…
