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Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

I would bet almost any amount of money this isn’t going to work.

In any mesh network, the overhead of coordinating nodes dominates network traffic. This is before you even begin to think about the terms of service violations for all of these WiFi access points.

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Why not? Keep in mind that most phone use these days is not voice traffic. Even the voice calls are often done from home, work, or somewhere with wifi (like restaurants, bars, airports, libraries, grocery stores, schools, universities, etc).

Despite using my phone heavily I often use less than 1GB a month on LTE (probably at least 10x than on wifi). About the only change in behavior I made is having photos backed up only on wifi, preload maps for places I drive, and download podcasts only on wifi. If watching netflix on public transportation or similar I do download it ahead of time.

Volks does has a sim/LTE connection, it's used when needed.

Spectrum is limited. Multihop meshing burdens the shared medium harder than a conventional network. Mesh believers always argue that it would work well if only it had enough members, but I believe that you reach too many nodes before you reach enough.

That said, the technology might be a pretty cool upgrade to the walkie talkie for groups coordinating in remote areas. But I'm afraid it will be just yet another attempt at selling phones to the unsustainably small niche of wealthy antiauthoritarians. Or it might be a front to scam mesh anarchist talent into working on resilient networking infrastructure for the army, because they surely would fit the bill of "groups coordinating in remote areas" (I don't really believe that, they have wildly different problems and options).

And you haven't even mentioned the fact that mobile phones can move around, leading to high rates of dropped connections as devices come and go. There's no way this is going to work.

Whoops, my phone connected to someone on a train that just went past! My phone call just dropped.

Think of it the opposite way. You have no coverage, are trying to get a message out and the nearest gateway is miles away. A moving car/train is close to you for plenty of time to transfer a few 100 bytes, and someone in the car/train has a mesh aware widget. It stores a copy and waits to go near a gateway where it upload it for you.

Sure, it's not as nice as a WAN connection, but the average cellular contract is pretty expensive per month. Something like $10 per GB, and often a $30 and up base rate.

So sure, long distance multi-hop mesh stinks for real time voice, but could be quite usable for other use cases.

Ah, but now you're talking about solving an additional problem, delay tolerant networking, on top of mesh networking. This adds a whole new layer of complexity on top of the mesh network, and would probably only work as you say for a subset of services that are made to handle this type of unreliable network.

Also many common delay tolerant network implementations rely on message replication to increase the probability of delivery of the message. This puts additional bandwidth strain on the inter-node hops of the network, which as some of the other commenters pointed out, not actually all that high.

Indeed, seems only practical for things like SMS/IM type traffic where even a Long/LAT + 30 character message every few minutes would be quite useful.

Why would your call be routed just via one single phone?

Are you going to send the message over more than one route? That doubles the required bandwidth over the entire mesh.

You could do something smarter with error correcting codes. Using a rateless code you split your message into an infinite number of chunks, then send these chunks out on your multiple paths, and then once enough chunks have been received you ACK each path. No bandwidth wasted.

I think specifically with voice it should be possible to send two chunks such that if they both arrive then you get your audio, and if only one arrives then you still get your audio but at a lower quality.

This is similar to Multipath TCP, for anybody interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_TCP

Cellular phone deal with this when you are in motion anyway. You just need redundant routes to offset the volatility of the network. A half mile per hop range could work, if the network is sufficiently dense (and the number of egress points is sufficiently high).

This is the kind of thing you do a test with in a specific targeted community though...

So they’re proposing to use WiFi to connect to other phones, right? And the only way to exchange data from me (pointA) to somewhere else (pointB) is to have a chain of phone users connecting my location to pointB. And how close would each connection need to be? It’s not like cellphones have antennae the size of cellular towers. So stupid.

And assuming this could magically work, do you need to build an entire new phone? Or can it just be a software problem? That way you could defer to cellular network in cases where this would inevitably fail.

"Volk One devices can connect to each other, from several miles away. They can also hop, to reach devices farther away." I think it must be something other than WiFi. Not sure how they are getting that kind of range, but it would make things a lot more practical.

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