The doom of the telecomms carriers
<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>
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<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>
<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>
<ul>
<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>
<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>
<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>
<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>
<li>This mesh would be self-deploying; instead of fixed node locations, it goes where the users are.</li>
</ul>
<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>
<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>
