[cap-talk] phones as routers

[John Carlson]

When are we going to be able to communicate from phone to phone (or  
computer to computer) w/o going through a centralized capitalistic  
service provider?

Does anyone else see the vision of  a sea of phones, all  
communicating with each other?  They won't be cell phones anymore  
will they?

Who is working on the capability protocols and phone operating  
systems required for this?  Can we use anything from ham radios?  How  
much power will it take?  Can cell phones in a building coordinate  
and choose the phone that is plugged into the power supply on the  
wall as a router?

I am seeing that there's a walkie-talkie feature on Nextel phones.   
Does anyone have a reference to Motorola's iDEN?  It looks like it  
still uses the network to send messages.  Oh well.

I'm only talking WiFi if I can get to google without going through  
cable or satellites.  And obviously, it must be more secure than WiFi.

Wouldn't it be cool to see the phones in your local area on  some  
display on your phone?  Perhaps databases will be more distributed to  
local centers, and advanced caching will be used.  If you don't want  
someone to see your phone,
you just reject their request.  You can even turn on auto-reject.

If this is old hat, someone slap me with a piece of spaghetti.

What if you got paid for passing packets through your phone?  I can  
imagine the mom-and-pop stores popping up everywhere advertising to  
route your packets.

Obviously, I am not a network engineer, who would tell me there are a  
limited number of frequencies available, and someone needs to  
allocate frequencies.  I would ask if they could measure power and  
direction of the signal.  Putting in a few more
sensors into a cell phone may give you enough information to sort out  
who is saying what.

John