In the US they have an emergency broadcast system which the US government can use to get information out to the public. It of course relies on TV and radio and anyone not listening to those would miss the message. To rectify this Motorola has patented an idea that they could send messages to mobiles and get them to inform their users. Read here. Sounds good.
The interesting part though was it also looks at sending messages to the phones if they are out of the service area. Meaning that they can’t normally send or receive a phone call. The principle behind this is that the phones in contact with a base station communicate with other phones in range of them but out of range of the base station and repeating this can hop the signals to other the phones even further away.
Although the suggestion here is for a central station to broadcast a message out to all the other phones it could work in many different ways. For example how about a phone out of base station range hopping an emergency call to the emergency services. That would be good. Or how about enabling a network of phones with a single base station connected to the main phone grid but voice is sent by hopping between them for normal calls with long distance being via the base station. It could even enable contact between the inhabitants of a small village in Africa for example without any base station to provide comms but at little cost. Or even in the West having slightly modified mobiles as cheap base stations where currently there is no signal available.
With the rapid increase in bandwidth we are seeing now and with the acceptance of a little voice degradation this would undoubtedly be a boon to all but the mobile phone companies. Free local calls. Of course it would only really be of use to groups who have low usage of mobiles as heavy use would easily swamp key routing phones. In fact this would allow ordinary mobiles to be provided purely for use as routers simply by having them switched on but not being used at key locations.
And to take it even further it could allow lower powered phones to connect without any more base station installations in an area which would reduce the risk (if there is one of phone radiation) and allow much smaller phones, even just simple earpieces to be worn.
Isn’t technology wonderful and this is how progress is made.
Enabling mobile to mobile calls
In the US they have an emergency broadcast system which the US government can use to get information out to the public. It of course relies on TV and radio and anyone not listening to those would miss the message. To rectify this Motorola has patented an idea that they could send messages to mobiles and get them to inform their users. Read here. Sounds good.
The interesting part though was it also looks at sending messages to the phones if they are out of the service area. Meaning that they can’t normally send or receive a phone call. The principle behind this is that the phones in contact with a base station communicate with other phones in range of them but out of range of the base station and repeating this can hop the signals to other the phones even further away.
Although the suggestion here is for a central station to broadcast a message out to all the other phones it could work in many different ways. For example how about a phone out of base station range hopping an emergency call to the emergency services. That would be good. Or how about enabling a network of phones with a single base station connected to the main phone grid but voice is sent by hopping between them for normal calls with long distance being via the base station. It could even enable contact between the inhabitants of a small village in Africa for example without any base station to provide comms but at little cost. Or even in the West having slightly modified mobiles as cheap base stations where currently there is no signal available.
With the rapid increase in bandwidth we are seeing now and with the acceptance of a little voice degradation this would undoubtedly be a boon to all but the mobile phone companies. Free local calls. Of course it would only really be of use to groups who have low usage of mobiles as heavy use would easily swamp key routing phones. In fact this would allow ordinary mobiles to be provided purely for use as routers simply by having them switched on but not being used at key locations.
And to take it even further it could allow lower powered phones to connect without any more base station installations in an area which would reduce the risk (if there is one of phone radiation) and allow much smaller phones, even just simple earpieces to be worn.
Isn’t technology wonderful and this is how progress is made.