Why aren't there ad-hoc battery-powered "cell towers in a barrel" that could be "bombed" or floated into disaster zones to turn the thousands of useless cell phones in people's pockets into a crisis mesh network?

Certainly there are legal challenges.

Industry would push back...indefensibly.

But if all those cellphones (robust, low power, transmitters, receivers, computers, pre-deployed wherever people concentrate) could be quickly transformed into grassroots emergency infrastructure, all those challenges could and should be overcome.

RSVP ASAP here, or email schull@digitalgoods.com.

Comment by colpax:

There would be many many many problems with this the first is that mobile phone towers consume a lot of eletrcity, the less power you give the unit the lower its range will be.

Mobile phone towers need to communicate with the network, this is usally done using wired communication points. A sat alternative can be used but this would be very difficult to set up ie getting line of sight etc.

base station locations where you can drop it is not likely to be particually useful and will require a lot of tought.

cost, building and maintaining these extra stations (and you would need 1000's speard across the country) this is likely to hit people phone bills or the tax payer.

capacity, whenever a major act happens mobile networks capcitiy is jammed. In London after the recent terrorist attacks the mobile phone system became jammed for hours and that was when just 50 people were killed in one of the highest phone capacity areas on the planet. Imagine how many phone calls would have come out of new orleans

Better solutions would be to develop with government funding existing systems to make them more resistant against loss of power breaks in landline connections.

JonSchull replies

Thanks for the comment.

However, I was wrong to characterize this as a "cell tower." More accurately it would be a mesh alternative to a cell tower, and it would NOT need to tie back to the main network. Basically, cellMeshers would spoof cell phones, convincing them that they were normal cell towers. cellMeshers would exchange messages with each other (or with satellites) to allow people to communicate beyond their own local cellMesher.

I don't see why these devices would need more power (per conversation) than a cell phone.

Rather than trying to shore up an arcane system, a better use of resources might to be promote a more distributed power sources not directly connected to the legacy power grid (which will fail). In the west and south for example the use of solar cells would enable homes and business to supply power to emergency communications (as well as off-load regular power generation) and operate off-grid for an extended period (close to cost effective). Next-gen wireless networks like Wi-Max will have the ability to provide wireless networks across a large geographic area with minimal infrastructure costs. The Wi-Max base stations can be equipped with non-stop power and alternative communication links (rather than each cell tower) As well as more traditional disaster planning such as generators at all gas station to insure uptime during a power outage. (will pumps work if the phones are down.. no CC?)

thanks for sharing this valuable information with your readers regards, negeriads.com solusi berpromosi

contributed by user1153 on Oct 16 6:56pm

The reforms you suggest are absolutely worth pursuing. But it will be years before that alternative infrastructure is a deployed solution.
Meanwhile, powerful radio-enabled computers --cell phones-- are in everyone's pockets.
A latent, distributed radio-enabled supercomputer is a terrible thing to waste.
--Jon Schull
----
See also this commercial application at PacketHop

contributed by Greg Burton on Oct 17 12:00pm

coming here to find valuable information and something interesting
regards,
negeriads.com solusi berpromosi

contributed by dude herlino on Mar 25 9:17pm