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Saturday, October 13, 2007

Free cellular calls. No cell towers needed. Say bye-bye to your service provider.

From Neoseeker -

TerraNet, a Swedish company, has begun testing of their new peer-2-peer calling system. No service provider needed, no cell towers required, just a fully charged cellphone and other users are all that is required.

Their system uses modified handsets to roam out over a cellular mesh network to find peers within 2km of range. Once a peer is found, your cell call is passed through that peer and up to a maximum of seven hops in total until you're connected. Though the system probably wont be implemented in large cities, TerraNet has pointed out that this P2P calling feature would be sufficient to cover a small rural village or a disaster area. The modified handset are currently undergoing some field testing in both Tanzania and Ecuador.

As mentioned earlier, the handsets in question do require the TerraNet hardware to function in this mesh network calling mode. TerraNet is hopeful that cell phone manufacturers will begin adopting this technology in future revisions of their phones. So far only Ericsson has signed on.

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