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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it's crazy how with a $15 walkie talkie running on AAA batteries you can talk to your friend miles away in the wilderness, but your $1000 phone is a brick if it can't see a cell tower. Something went wrong there.

Pretty soon we're going to have satellite cell service via Starlink. So it will work, but it will be silly when your signals are going to space and back twice to travel a mile as the crow flies.

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Your comment led me to searching "Walkie Talkie Mesh" and it turns out it is a thing. Apparently 20 mile radius, 100+ devices, but at an eye-watering price. Getting one for you and your 4 closest friends will run you the price of a Mitsubishi Mirage.

https://beartooth.com/products/beartooth-mk-ii

Retevis also now has RB24, a lora based mesh radio that does voice, but the details are very sparce. The system claims to do up to 32 hops, which has potential for some very decent range with a large enough population.

https://www.retevis.com/rb91-direct-frequency-digital-repeat...

It will be interesting to see how it actually works in real life and how the codec they use sounds like.

Exactly and more generally it'd be interesting to see if those space cell tower live to the promise. I suspect they'd be great for texting and very light web pages but with 7 Mbit/s per cell (that's the number I remember reading) it might end up feeling feel very sluggish if used with our existing internet applications and protocol stack.

>but your $1000 phone is a brick if it can't see a cell tower. Something went wrong there.

I suppose in that case there are mesh networking apps such as Briar? https://briarproject.org/

Doesn't briar expose your hardware MAC

>but your $1000 phone is a brick if it can't see a cell tower. Something went wrong there.

it's not exactly a "brick". airdrop/bluetooth still work albeit at a reduced range.

I've recently had to move a few dozen MBs over Bluetooth and it took several minutes, so this barely counts. AirDrop is artificially limited to Apple devices, as is Google's thing to Google Android. Basically a brick.

Its a mobile (celltower) first technology. Not a device first technology.

> Yeah, it's crazy how with a $15 walkie talkie running on AAA batteries you can talk to your friend miles away in the wilderness, but your $1000 phone is a brick if it can't see a cell tower. Something went wrong there.

right? And it's almost unbelievable that a $150 bike can travel hundreds of miles in the wilderness, but a $30000 car becomes a brick the moment it runs out of gas.

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