Comment by sliken
7 years ago
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).