Very interesting. This website is completely unusable on Chrome 72 (MacBook Pro 15" Mid-2015) but is smooth as butter on Safari.
Weird, it seems to be totally smooth for me on Chrome 72 (MacBook Pro 13" 2017).
Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
31–40 of 124 posts
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#32This will have Gotenna like speeds, that is it will take several seconds to send a small text message. That’s in an optimistic scenario where the recipient is within a mile or two of you. In a mesh scenario, the speed is going to go way down. In an area urban enough that there are other VolkFi owners to mesh through, there is almost always going to be cell service. It’s just a gimmick to let them sell some slightly modified Android phones. My guess is that they will almost always be connected through the cellular network. If the user would then like to imagine that they are connected to some kind of physics-defying mesh network, I suppose that’s nice. They could probably save on production costs by omitting the 900mhz chip with almost no effect on the service.
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#33Website just about crashed my browser. I hope I can find out what it's about here.
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#34I 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.
And you haven't even mentioned the fact that mobile phones can move around, leading to high rates of dropped connections as devices come and go. There's no way this is going to work.
Cellular phone deal with this when you are in motion anyway. You just need redundant routes to offset the volatility of the network. A half mile per hop range could work, if the network is sufficiently dense (and the number of egress points is sufficiently high).
This is the kind of thing you do a test with in a specific targeted community though...
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#35I 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.
I was also curious, and found https://volkfi.com/whyinvite which has a constructive sounding heading
> Why is Volk Fi invite-only
followed by blather blather about the technology and then finally some invite-sounding text of
> But, because Volk Fi is crowdsourced, it needs a certain user density in order to have full coverage and reliability
which seems to run directly in contradiction to why one would want the system to be invite-only. Can you imagine starting a BitTorrent service, and then trying to ensure the swarm stayed small by only telling your roommates? I guess that's why I'm not in marketing.
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#36This 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…
They mention on Reddit that they are using 900 MHz.
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#37This 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…
I work with 900MHz radios and infrastructure, here's my thoughts:
> The frequencies are what I'm confused by 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.
Seems likely, and probably even works in controlled tests over relatively short distances. 900MHz meshing radios certainly exist, like this one (no affiliation with them, haven't used the product): https://www.rajant.com/products/breadcrumb-wireless-nodes/lx...
>Even with a high 30 dB signal to noise ratio, the Shannon channel capacity in a 26 MHz band is 50 Mbps.
Impossible in urban areas without highly directional antennas (which aren't small). The effective noise floor in most even semi-developed areas I've worked in is ~-100 to -80dBm - it can be a struggle even with expensive radios and fixed infrastructure. 30dB SNR just isn't going to happen over any appreciable amount of range on this sort of device (a high gain parabolic dish? sure). Using all 26MHz of the spectrum with an omni directional antenna (again, as would be required) also isn't going to happen except over relatively short distances.
900MHz is good technology, and can get robust, long distance links with the right infrastructure (I most work on 1-10mi links). The limitations on a pocket sized device with a pocket sized antenna mean this is unlikely to work @ 900MHz- especially in their fantasized scenarios of being in areas with no cell phone coverage (cell carriers have access to better bands, and far better infrastructure).
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#38This is a product I might buy - if I could actually buy it.
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#39>Volk One devices can connect to each other, from several miles away. Assuming that a voice call requires 8kbit/s of bandwidth, and assuming that you have about a watt of power, how feasible is it to connect through a phone that is a mile away? Serious question - I don't know how to do the math here.
Trivial with the correct infrastructure - you can easily get 8kbps in 12.5kHz of bandwidth (a reasonably common channel size in the sub-GHz bands).
Trick is, you ideally need line of site (in which case your effective range is effectively the horizon), and directional antennas for distances more than a relatively short distance (a few miles maybe).
Some math follows. 30dBm is 1 W, and -100dBm is a low, but probably workable signal. We'll assume 0 antenna gain or loss to make the math easier.
Free Space Path Loss (in dB): 20×log10(d) + 20×log10(f) + 92.45
d=distance in km, f=frequency in GHz
So at 915MHz, we can get about 85km in free space @ 915MHz (this is actually past the horizon, so not really possible except from high elevations).
30dBm − (20×log10(85) + 20×log10(.915) +92.45) = -100dBm
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#40This 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…
Sounds like a genius idea to me. In theory at least.