Wednesday, August 4, 2010

mobile phone

No reception? No problem: use your mobile phone as a cell tower

An Australian University is testing new technology that can let you make mobile calls even when there’s no network available. Flinders University in Adelaide is using WiFi technology to allow multiple mobiles to create their own, small network.

What’s the story?

The Australian outback has some serious reception problems. There are large portions of it where it is simply not economically viable for an operator to build a network. But the technology being tested here by Flinders could be used anywhere in the world where reception is a problem.

Simply put,ipad covers, it allows mobile phones to transmit calls to one another without needing either cell towers or satellites – by using WiFi technology that is in almost all modern mobile phones.

How does it work?

The Flinders team,wii glove, lead by Dr. Paul Gardner-Stephen,cheap flower girl dressess, has created software that detects other phones in its WiFi radius, and places calls to them without needing an operator. Obviously, the big challenge for an idea like this is range. At best, a mobile phone will have a WiFi radius of a few hundred feet. And that’s in ideal circumstances – in a city or heavily urban area,cheap headphones, the effect broadcast range will be much shorter. To fix this problem,iphone touch pen, the software also allows your phone to act as a small cell tower. It means that your phone can pick up and relay someone else’s phone call. So if there are other mobile devices in your area, your radius is much larger.

What use is it?

So we’ve got a technology that is useful only when there’s a decent concentration of mobile devices in an area. But if there’s a lot of mobile devices in an area, it’s probably because there’s already a network there. So what use is this service? Flinders University is looking at the area of disaster relief. The Haiti disaster earlier this year highlighted how a countries telecoms grid can be knocked out during an emergency. As a means of donation,android phone china, and as a way for emergency services to stay in contact, mobile networks were incredibly important in Haiti – and Ericsson deployed a “network in a can” to Haiti at great expense, quickly creating a basic network that allowed services in the country to keep in contact.

This technology could be used to do the same thing, but at a potentially much lower cost. By deploying a number of small transmitters to bolster the signal,bold 9000 cover, this technology could create an operational mobile network from just the phones in the area.

What we think?

While this is a very interesting technology, it immediately faces a lot of problems. First and foremost,wedding dresses, I would think,china phone mobile, are the mobile operators. They will not be happy to see someone creating a mobile telecoms network that doesn’t require all the expensive infrastructure they’ve been deploying for decades. There are also capacity issues – the WiFi connection on most smartphones can be very dodgy at the best of times. It might not be robust enough to patch multiple calls through  – especially during an emergency event where everybody will be making phone calls. It also has the problem of being very localised. It may only be able to maintain a network in a single urban area.

Despite these issues, which I’m sure the research team is ironing out in the testing phase, this seems like a very exciting development. It’s an interesting,pc headset, new way to use technology that is present in the majority of phones being created today, where even mid- to low-range devices have WiFi connectivity.

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