The Internet

Today was interesting, Massey University Palmerston North hosted a guest lecturer who talked about the internet. It was largely a history lecture, but some interesting issues and ideas were raised surrounding the internet. One comment that i found particularly interesting was about embedded device networking and it's interfacing to the internet.

One idea this raises is if your home appliances were connected to the internet, how would they be kept safe? What would you do if someone hacked your toaster or changed the temperature on your hot water supply. But yea the main idea i got thinking about was ubiquitous networking (sort of related to the smart toaster). What if we had every modern device with any sort of smarts try and network to any other device in range? This would create a constant moving P2P network between these devices. The great application for this is mobile phones, and viral information distribution. You could create bulk messaging systems like say a news website. This website could then be updated at a hardwired local node (say a cell site), and then that cell site transmits to all other nodes in range. If you wanted to save bandwidth you would make use of the viral distribution network: transmit to say 20% of the network, then use that 20% to virally spread the information to other devices in range.

This would practically put mobile service providers out of a job if it could be made to work; you could distribute information en masse simply by getting each node to sync with every other node in range. My great vision for this would be diminishing the need for wireless access points for internet; the devices become the internet; their interconnections support a short range network allowing information to hop from device to device to reach it's destination, rather than relying on the cell site to transmit the information to each device.

For another example, you could have two people on opposite sides of a town/city IM each other. Normally message would be transmitted to the cell site, then through local network infrastructure, then to possibly another cell site, and finally transmitted to the target phone. From the phone company's point of view they could free up bandwidth on the infrastructure for other information. From the person's point of view it would be cheaper because there practically isn't any cost to make a message jump from phone to phone.

This is not a perfect system by any means though: the first and biggest hurdle is that the technology would have to be available, and it would require cooperation from phone vendors and telecos. With most telecos, they would not be willing to let people exchange any sort of information for free; they make their money by making people pay for it. A great example is how Telecom NZ has always used CDMA handsets that are stripped of all software that allows you to transfer content from computers or other devices. This means you have to buy any new content from their "online stores" via WAP or other mobile services.

Ideally though, it is exciting to think about mini-networks driven by mobile devices. Bringing us slightly closer to that goal of faster, cheaper information exchange. It relies on the principle of human population density, where most people are concentrated on popular centres, which cause more people to gravitate toward them simply by being populous. Because in these areas people are so densely packed in a single area, viral information distribution and networks like the one i have described would be highly feasable to reduce the amount of traffic going through cell sites. It could also make internet access cheaper for people on the move if it could be integrated with local wifi networks; phones could attach themselves to nearby wifi networks and be used as mini cell sites for other phones to communicate with.

The big thing about any part of this theory that i've put forward is that it means phones/nodes/devices/whatever we're talking about here would be constantly active. For mobile phones this would mean a much, much shorter battery life. Even standard wifi equipment uses a reasonable amount of power. So this theory is largely hitched on the classic hitch to all mobile technology; a power source/battery life. You could lower the power requirement, but this would shorten the range considerably. This might still be feasable in a small area scope; maybe up to a couple hundred metres of low-bandwidth networking? This would be enough for places like schools, universities, businesses.