When I first heard about Project Fi, this is what I imagined it to be like. I was a little disappointed when I found out it was just glorified wifi-calling.
Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
21–30 of 124 posts
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#22I would bet almost any amount of money this isn’t going to work. In any mesh network, the overhead of coordinating nodes dominates network traffic. This is before you even begin to think about the terms of service violations for all of these WiFi access points.
So they’re proposing to use WiFi to connect to other phones, right? And the only way to exchange data from me (pointA) to somewhere else (pointB) is to have a chain of phone users connecting my location to pointB. And how close would each connection need to be? It’s not like cellphones have antennae the size of cellular towers. So stupid. And assuming this could magically work, do you need to build an entire new phon…
"Volk One devices can connect to each other, from several miles away. They can also hop, to reach devices farther away."
I think it must be something other than WiFi. Not sure how they are getting that kind of range, but it would make things a lot more practical.
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#23I'd happily put a large omnidirectional wifi antenna on my roof to help out with something like this.... if I could get a fair rate for the bandwidth used. My city has 70k people or so, and is perfectly flat.
Similarly I'd be willing to help with any p2p type wireless, with a radio, antenna, and raspberry Pi or similar. Sadly most p2p wireless internet gateways are proprietary.
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#24I would bet almost any amount of money this isn’t going to work. In any mesh network, the overhead of coordinating nodes dominates network traffic. This is before you even begin to think about the terms of service violations for all of these WiFi access points.
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.
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#25This makes a bit more sense: "Every Volk phone has a SIM card slot and supports use on traditional LTE networks. However, a SIM is not necessary and the phone will always prioritize the Volk network first. The Volk network works as such: every Volk user gets a special router with their phone. The router acts as a wireless Qi charging pad also. The router connects to your existing internet via Ethernet or something si…
The frequencies are what I was curious about as well. To have a half mile range at relatively low powers it would need to be a low frequency band.
I'm guessing they haven't bought licenses from the FCC, so my bet is that they're using the 900 MHz ISM band.
There's only 26 MHz of spectrum in that band, which isn't much, particularly for a mesh setup that won't be particularly spectrally efficient.
Even with a high 30 dB signal to noise ratio, the Shannon channel capacity in a 26 MHz band is 50 Mbps. MIMO helps a bit, but even in ideal real-world conditions you'll likely have at most 50 Mbps to share between all the users connected to a node. Spread that across a few users/mesh hops, throw in some packet retransmissions and noise, and it's not nearly enough to compete with LTE networks at any meaningful user density.
Incentivizing users to create as many nodes as possible is a good idea, as that allows lower power transmissions and better frequency reuse. It's still a huge struggle to get anywhere near commercial wireless speeds, particularly in areas where there are fewer nodes and a higher density of users.
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#26I don’t get the invite model. Ask someone already invited to send you an invite? I guess it prevents spam reservations but I don’t have Facebook or twitter, so I guess I’m out of luck.
Here you go, plenty of invite codes on their subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/VolkFi/comments/b1dyqy/lets_just_ge...
Thank you!
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#27This sounds great. One idea I had to stop abuse was to force traffic from a phone to route out to the public Internet through its own base station.
That would require a lot of hops, in some cases, but the traffic could short circuit through others' base stations back to their own through the Internet, without originating the traffic from the intermediaries. I wrote up more about this here:
https://stevenjewel.com/2014/01/android-mesh/
In this particular case they could originate the traffic from Volk servers instead.
Also, people here may be interested in GoTenna, a portable mesh network hotspot that has been out for a few years, at roughly $75 each.
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#28Very interesting. This website is completely unusable on Chrome 72 (MacBook Pro 15" Mid-2015) but is smooth as butter on Safari.
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#29How can internet connectivity be free? Doesn’t someone need to pay for a connection?
To answer my own question, as per the FAQ: Volk Fi counts data usage and bytes shared via WiFi. Every user gets the amount they share, unlimited. If a Volk user consumes more data than they share in a month, there is a 5GB data cap. After that, the user can pay the super cheap price of $1/GB for additional data.
Ah, yet another carrier offering Unlimited* data.
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#30How can internet connectivity be free? Doesn’t someone need to pay for a connection?
To answer my own question, as per the FAQ: Volk Fi counts data usage and bytes shared via WiFi. Every user gets the amount they share, unlimited. If a Volk user consumes more data than they share in a month, there is a 5GB data cap. After that, the user can pay the super cheap price of $1/GB for additional data.
So as someone who starts out with a YC '19 * Volk Fi phone, your sharing will be at 0, and therefore immediately subject to a 5GB data cap with $1/gb afterward.
Uh huh. In the old days, we called this a "Multilevel Marketing scam".
(And the best part is that I would pay for my own internet line, AND pay for my phone use use my internet line.)
* https://igamerss.com/index.php/2019/03/19/here-are-the-85-st...
"Volk Wi-fi: Volk is making an Android smartphone with a free information plan, no service required. The co-founders say they’re utilizing long-range wi-fi to share connections and construct a community of telephones. Co-Founder Greg Hazel was the Chief Architect at Bittorrent, whereas co-founder Straya Markovic was the lead engineer at mesh messaging platform Firechat."