Comment by jansper39
1 month ago
Personally, the additional complexity and overheads required for a P2P phone network is not worth while and I'm not sure it would fix that many problems that haven't already been fixed with walkie talkies.
1 month ago
Personally, the additional complexity and overheads required for a P2P phone network is not worth while and I'm not sure it would fix that many problems that haven't already been fixed with walkie talkies.
Not worthwhile? “It’s too hard” isn’t a great argument for why our phones should just become useless during power outages, natural disasters, ..
It’s not “too hard”. It’s physically impossible without regulation. There is but one limited RF spectrum that we all share. One bad actor (intentional or misconfigured) can render the entire RF spectrum in their area unusable. The radius of their impact only depends on how much kWHs they have access to and it doesn’t take much to cripple radio communication in a large metropolitan area.
Until some clever cookie can figure out some way to utilize string theory’s extra dimensions for sending signals and then every body can have their own dimension to mess with, collective regulation on broadcasters is the only feasible way.
Nothing is stopping you from getting an HT for communication during power outages, natural disasters, etc. You just have to get a license to make sure you don’t actively harm everyone who is sharing the same spectrum with you especially during said natural disaster.
Theoretically people could cripple RF comms on accident, in reality that almost never happens despite many people possessing devices able to do so. My mikrotik router will let me broadcast all sorts of illegal signals with a few clicks inside their GUI, and yet I never heard about problems with people crippling city blocks with bad router settings. Or from their weird microwave setups. Or trying to run and operate some dilapidated 60 year old radios.
1 reply →
> It’s physically impossible without regulation.
Not true. Bluetooth, lora, and zigbee all coexist in the same unlicensed spectrum just fine. There’s no reason phones couldn’t speak these, or that a similar low-power protocol couldn’t be standardized.
> One bad actor can render the entire RF spectrum in their area unusable.
Ok, and? That’s already true for cellular, gps, and wifi today.
> Nothing is stopping you from getting an HT for communication during power outages, natural disasters, etc.
You’re missing the point. People already carry radios everywhere which are more than capable of longer range p2p communications.
The real question is why no such standard exists, despite its obvious utility.
Telling people to just carry an HT is smug and irrelevant. Average people carry phones.
2 replies →
Not worthwhile to who?
The point is exactly that everybody is carrying a phone, but almost nobody is carrying a walkie-talkie. And why should I carry one more thing? My smartphone has already replaced my music player, camera...
It’s one less thing to have to buy and carry and charge and configure and remember and get others to do the same.