I would love to see a version for amateur radio that uses amateur bands with more power. It would of course need to be un-encrypted but that is fine with me.
Ham radio already does this to a certain extent I believe:
Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
101–110 of 124 posts
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#102What's with the name? Sounds very iffy to me. Posts like this on the subreddit don't help: https://www.reddit.com/r/VolkFi/comments/b0xpmn/volkfi_viral...
Volk is German for 'People'. It's like the English 'Folk'. That reddit link sounds like just a single dude trying to expand the reach, who isn't affiliated with volkfi, but I would say he is trolling using the name like "stormtroopers"...
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#103Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Smartphone!
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#104This 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 m…
The claim is that they'll always prioritize Volk over LTE. Which is an interesting promise, because if you're correct, they'd potentially be prioritizing the slower connection.
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#105I love the amount of unfettered optimism in this thread, but lets be clear this likely will amount to vaporware (at least the mesh part).
Using an invite only system to bootstrap a distributed network that inherently relies on network effect makes absolutely no sense.
Having an amateurish website that consumes so much resources it doesn't render faster than 5 FPS on an MBP should make you question the marketing prowess of this company.
Straya Markovic, one of the lead engineers for FireChat is a co-founder. This is both a pro and a con. Like most engineer led companies they don't seem to understand the tremendous effort required to bootstrap this network and focus only on the technology aspects in their marketing.
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#106it reminded me of similar project open garden
https://www.opengarden.com/
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoops, my phone connected to someone on a train that just went past! My phone call just dropped.
Think of it the opposite way. You have no coverage, are trying to get a message out and the nearest gateway is miles away. A moving car/train is close to you for plenty of time to transfer a few 100 bytes, and someone in the car/train has a mesh aware widget. It stores a copy and waits to go near a gateway where it upload it for you. Sure, it's not as nice as a WAN connection, but the average cellular contract is pre…
Ah, but now you're talking about solving an additional problem, delay tolerant networking, on top of mesh networking. This adds a whole new layer of complexity on top of the mesh network, and would probably only work as you say for a subset of services that are made to handle this type of unreliable network.
Also many common delay tolerant network implementations rely on message replication to increase the probability of delivery of the message. This puts additional bandwidth strain on the inter-node hops of the network, which as some of the other commenters pointed out, not actually all that high.
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#108This 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'm guessing they haven't bought licenses from the FCC, so my bet is that they're using the 900 MHz ISM band.
No FCC filings for this device yet that I found. I guess we'll have to see.
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#109This 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…
> If there are no routers or Volk phones nearby to hop to, you'll either not have service, have to use Wifi, or fallback to LTE if you have a SIM card installed and it has active service.
That does make the "Global Coverage: Our network is everywhere our users are" claim a bit dodgy, no? Sure, you'll have coverage in the middle of the desert—if there happens to be a chain of Volk phones from there to the nearest point with actual regular coverage... which is highly unlikely.
Re: Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone
#110You should add a Bitcoin option for checkout/reservation.