A few years back I was thinking about a way to build a charge free phone service, or at least one free locally. In US you can make local calls without additional costs, but in Europe all calls are charged per minute/second. At first I thought that people could connect P2P eliminating the need for a service provider, thus not being charged by anyone, like walkie-talkie or CB radio. This would work on short distances, but to be a full phone service there would be the need for some relaying station.
Hmm am I inventing the wheel, again?
What the hell? A plain cell phone service provider is just relaying connections/calls. So could we make phone handset that could be a relaying station? This way phones that would be near by could network themselves, and offer a relaying service to each other. More phone means more bandwidth requirements but also wider bandwidth capabilities.
Sure if you would like to make an cross Atlantic call you would have to use some other service, or interface grid phone network (GPN) with some other service, this would cost something for sure… but still, how often do you call abroad? I my experience I use my cell phone to make local calls for 98% of the time, it would be nice if these ones where free :).
At some point there would be the need for some kind of directory service, your phone would have to register in the network and make sure other phones can find yours in the network, and the network can rout calls properly. Still maintaining one/few directory/registration nodes in the network, is THAT MUCH cheaper than maintaining tens of thousand cell phone antenna towers.
How about not-mobile phones, placed in homes not-moving around in the network. They do not need to advertise their location often, and have more power at their disposal. If the GPN would have many of these, say – in a metro area, they could serve as an almost static routing network or point of reference.
I think the technology is here and all we have to do is just combine some of already existing concepts and incorporate them into GPN, a self balancing, self sufficient network. I think that there are already studies made on this or that university, or event a complete plans to build such network in some secret basement of a big telecom company. Telecoms make such big bucks on networks that they control that event if the technology is here, creating a network that cannot be controlled is in THEIR interest.
I this really free? No. You would have to contribute to the GPN by allowing your phone to utilize your power to relay other people traffic.
If I had a spare few million $, I would start a company, design a hardware, incorporate the technology into cell phones, and start to build the next generation wireless Internet.
All it would take co start avalanche is making a small city, 5K~15K residents, use GPN on daily basis. I’m sure that other would follow…