We all know how we are at the mercy of the mobile phone and cable companies. The ISPs are the ones who control our access to the digital world. We ultimately are at their mercy while they also monitor everything we do.
This is coupled with the mobile producers such as Apple and other manufacturers. In short, everyone is monitoring what is taking place on our phones.
There is a company that seeks to change they. They are working on establishing a mesh network where wireless signals come from other phones.
This is not an endorsement of the product or the company. It is merely for informational purposes.
The concept follows that of crowdsourcing. However, instead of people providing money, they offer of WiFi access.
This projects take WiFi signals and links them to phones. Each phone serves as a repeater station, providing connect to other phones in the area. As the network grows, more bandwidth is available, providing even more power to it.
The phones send the signal out about 8 miles according to the website.
We see they are priced in the range of other premium phones.
This appears to be a very interesting project. The fact that they eliminate cell towers removes the major cell phone carriers from the equation. By linking into WiFi and repeating it, the company hopes to establish a peer-to-peer mesh network.
The billing plan is also interesting. One gets as much data as he or she provides to the network. Thus, people have incentive to provide WiFi access to avoid overage charges.
This project is looking to address a growing need. We are seeing the ISPs exert more power. By establishing a decentralized network, people's mobile usage, at least from the telco end of things, will be freed up.
Obviously, this is not rolled out as of yet since the phones are not even available. I have no idea about this company so if anyone is familiar with it, please add your thoughts in the comments.
Here is the link to their website:
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gif by @doze
Great to read that piece and to learn about VOlk. Hope to do more research on their products. Are they away of a decentralized blogging platform like hive so they can maximize this as their communication channel. Thanks For this info.
I wouldnt think they know about Hive but I cannot say for certain.
It is one of the reasons why I think we need to start promoting decentralized projects that users can embrace.
Hopefully more seek out solutions and are willing to share then with the rest of the community.
This could be awesome or super terrible depending on the health effects. Mesh networks are definitely a great idea to break free of big telecom, but holding a mini cell tower up to your head to talk to mom would probably be a bad idea. I’ll definitely look more into it :) thanks for this.
That phone is pretty sweet at the very least. Cool that it comes with an unlocked android os. Looks like you need to have a router set up in your home so not ideal for us migratory folks but I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on this 👁