[kictanet] Swedish start-up TerraNet claims peer-to-peer mobile will increase phone penetration in developing countries

[alice]

        Swedish start-up TerraNet claims peer-to-peer mobile will
        increase phone penetration in developing countries


Swedish start-up TerraNet has revealed further detail of its 
‘peer-to-peer’ mobile phone technology that it claims could play a big 
role in increasing phone penetration in developing countries.

According to TerraNet CEO and founder, Anders Carlius the company is 
working on what he calls ‘ad hoc’ networking Terranet’s peer-to-peer 
technology turns each handset into a switching node, passing on calls 
from other handsets within a 1 kilometre range. Each handset can 
simultaneously transit 7 calls and each call can make 7 hops before the 
switching delay starts to make conversation difficult.

This peer-to-peer hopping communications has been done before in 
military applications, although expensively, and in the Tetra emergency 
communications system, but this is the first time anyone has tackled the 
mass market in this way.

But isn’t the seven kilometre limit a real drawback? “It only seems so 
because we, us rich people in the west, are all used to zooming around 
the country or around the world. The other 4 billion don’t travel more 
than a few kilometres in a typical working day”. And most of the people 
they know spend all their time within the those few kilometers too.”

Carlius is concerned to overcome the barrier to phone use from 
illiteracy. “I remember talking to a Pakistani telco who told me there 
was no way he could ever get beyond 40% penetration,” said Carlius. 
“‘Never? I asked.’ No,’ he said, ‘because 60% of our population is 
illiterate and innumerate and they therefore can’t use a phone.’ And he 
was right,” says Carlius. “If you think about it you can’t use a phone 
if you can’t read or manipulate numbers.”

So Carlius’s next rethink was around the three button phone concept. An 
ad hoc networking phone might use people’s pictures instead of their 
names and numbers, he says. But perhaps the most important, and most 
re-thought, part of the model is Carlius’s ideas around distribution. 
Instead of a telecom network, TerraNet (or whoever had licensed the 
technology) would build a network of agents to push the phones, collect 
the monies and, most important, load up the appropriate photos for the 
illiterate customers.

The technology still has to journey into final product. Journalists were 
shown a large circuit board working prototype but TerraNet says it has 
advance orders and expects to be manufacturing in bulk soonish.
(Source: TelecomTV)