9.11.2007

Trial me this, Batman

A new way of making calls directly between phones, for free, is being trialled by a Swedish company....

The TerraNet technology works using handsets adapted to work as peers that can route data or calls for other phones in the network.

The handsets also serve as nodes between other handsets, extending the reach of the entire system. Each handset has an effective range of about one kilometre.

(Mobile system promises free calls - BBC News)

P2P phone calling. Cool idea. But you won't see it in Omaha any time soon. You won't see it, in fact, anywhere the FCC can be lobbied into supressing it. Can't have all that competition screwing with the telcos' "free markets" now, can we?

2 comments:

SPIIDERWEB™ said...

I know free phones are a big deal, but...

Each handset has an effective range of about one kilometre.

That's 0.62137119 miles

I can't even reach my nearby neighbors with this "free phone" service.

I think I'll wait for more.

Ted Compton said...

Right. You could do better with a walkie-talkie, I suppose. But these phones relay, each one extending the network another half mile. Isn't that the way BitTorrent works, or the music downloading nets - or whatever, those P2P networks? In principle you could make as long (distance) a call as you liked as long as there were a relay every half mile.