I have a question for the techos out there who are familiar with GSM mobile phone architecture, possibly most relevant to the Java-enabled phones: Can a phone be hacked to communicate peer-to-peer (P2P) with other phones? Can one either modify the firmware, or get control of the OS through Java apps?
Why?
Well, I had this brainwave; here's the train of thought:
The enlightened ones among us see a time where decentralised (decentralized), bottom up, P2P, wireless networks come into being. The kind of thing where we're not dependent on a carrier or telco to be able to communicate with the wireless device in the next room, or street, or even city. I read a quote from some telco exec recently saying that the idea of a bottom-up WiFi network is crazy and will never happen because of the sheer number and density of access points required for coverage. Maybe. Maybe not.
But then it hit me: in this country at least, we have near-enough 1 mobile phone per person. That's a lot of wireless devices. And these are devices which communicate with towers up to 35km away, somewhat better than the 50m afforded by my WiFi base station. Now I don't know anything much about this, but I had the thought that, were these phones capable of P2P, they'd offer almost seamless coverage over the entire populated area of the country. And it'd free too. No inflated 3G charges, none of that.
Now does my question make sense? Yup, I know it's very naughty, etc., and that 35km to a high-placed, powerful transceiver is not the same as to another phone, and data-transmission is 9.6kb/s instead of the 54Mb/s of 802.11g, and each phone might need to chat to the telco's network to find out where it is geographically to effectively route packets over multiple hops.
But, can it be done?
9:41:50 PM 
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