PeopleNet (or PopulistNet)

I suppose that you can blame Telus for this, and, if they go out of business, it's their own fault.  I did tell them: Do not annoy grieving widowers.  They have lots of time to create and detail new ideas that may drive you out of business if you're not providing actual service to your customers.

Ever since I've thought of this, I have felt that it would be a really good idea to drive the telephone and telecommunications companies (generally known as telcos) out of business.  After all, they make tons of money, and make huge profit margins on, what is currently, very little outlay.

The telecommunications companies have a near monopoly.  They use this to ensure that they have large profits, for relatively little effort and expense.  We do not need the telephone companies.  Okay, there is the issue of long distance, but there are ways around that.  Or, we can simply set up new long distance companies, and let them know that provision of service is not actually necessary to most of our communications.

Forty years ago, I was giving seminars to public conferences and trade shows in the, then fairly active, enthusiast consumer space in computers and communications.  At that time, the Internet wasn't yet called the Internet, and those who did do anything with communications with home computers were probably dealing with Fidonet.  Or simply with local bulletin board systems that were connected to Fidonet.  Fidonet was a store and forward system, that allowed local bulletin boards to provide email, and share files fairly widely, by placing short calls at limited times of the day, without having to be constantly connected to a network.  What would become the Internet was operating at some universities and research institutions, and there were some standing connections between machines that provided for this.  Bulletin boards couldn't afford the kind of standing telephone lines dedicated for data communications transfer on a constant basis, and certainly not if it involved long distance.  Even businesses, and smaller research enterprises (probably using Unix systems), were using something called Usenet, which could use standing communications links, but could also operate on the store and forward basis like Fidonet.

At that time cell phones were big and clunky and usually built into cars, often with a handset up front, and possibly four boxes of electronics bolted into the back.  Even the "banana" phones that some might remember were still a ways into the future.  In my lectures and seminars, I would try to explain to the audience the advantages and efficiencies of packet switched networks, and the similarities with store and forward systems.  I would point out the cost advantages of performing communications in this way.  I often said that when you got your bill from the local telephone company, fifty percent of what you were paying the company did not go to the provision of service: it went to the printing of that bill.  In one of my seminars, someone stood up at the back, and said that he worked for the local telephone company, and I had my figures wrong.  Excellent, I said, you have better data: what is the real figure?  Ninety percent, he said.

And time went on, and technology developed.  The Internet spread, and was named, and more people joined it.  Computers got smaller and more powerful.  Cell phones got smaller and more powerful.  Networking developed apace.  And, eventually, we got to the point of voice calls being placed over data channels, because data channels were more efficient, and therefore cheaper.  And now, we are to the point where pretty much all calls are being placed over data channels.  When you get a landline, you may still be able to plug in your old phone connected with twisted pair wiring, within your house.  But the circuit box in your house probably connects that twisted pair wire to some kind of a data channel where dozens, or even hundreds, of phone calls are running through the same circuit, saving the telecommunications carrier an awful lot of money.  But they're still charging you the same amount for a home phone.

So all the calls are just data.  And we have lots of systems that you can use to place phone calls for free.  Internationally, avoiding long distance charges.  Long distance charges are pretty much eliminated on cell phones: cell phone companies usually sell you a package that allows you to place calls anywhere within your country for your monthly subscription rate.  The telephone and telecommunications companies know that it's an awful lot easier and simpler, and cheaper, to place phone calls than they are telling you.  And certainly than they are selling you.

We don't need the telephone companies.  They know this.  They just aren't admitting it.  Telephone companies are providing backbones, and switching services.  But our phones already do an awful lot of switching, and networking.  And they could do more.

Cell phones, these days, are small, and very powerful.  Everyone is carrying around a quite powerful computer, stuffed with a lot of very capable software, and using relatively little of its capabilities.

Currently, if you have a cell phone, it has to connect to, or "see," a cell phone tower or antenna.  There are lots of cell phone antennas around: the cell phone companies make sure of that.  It's a selling point, and point of competition for the various cellular companies.  They make a big deal about how far and widely you can travel, and how well you can connect to their particular network, wherever you are.  But you still have to see one of their towers.  If you are on back roads, or in the wilderness, or in mountainous regions, or in basements, or other places where you can't get a good connection, because you are too far away from a cell phone antenna, then you can't connect.

And cell phone systems, in common with all telephone systems, operate on a contention basis.  Telephone companies sell many more accounts then they can actually support, at any given time.  If everyone picked up their phone at the same time, or tried to place a call on their cell phone at the same time, nobody's call would go through.  We see this every time there's a disaster.  In a disaster you can never place a call on your cell phone.  The cellular service is not necessarily, itself, degraded by the disaster.  It's just that everybody, affected by the disaster, wants to try and place a phone call.  At the same time.  They can't.  The system is not designed to handle all the traffic that is needed to support all the subscribers that the cell phone companies have sold accounts, and phones, to.

The same thing happens with regular telephones.  If everyone tries to pick up the phone, at the same time, they don't all get dial come.  At best, maybe one or two percent of them will get dial tone.  All telephone systems are based on this contention model.  Everything has to go through the central office, everything as to go through the telephone company, and so the central equipment that they have is the limiting factor for how many people get to place phone calls.

But that's not the only model for communications.  Store and forward has been used for centuries.  It's our postal mail system.  It was Fidonet.  It's the way email works, which is why email is one of the most reliable forms of communication even today.  And even packet switched networks, on constantly connected networks, like the Internet, work on a kind of store and forward basis.

So, we can use a version of store and forward, such as a packet switched network, to place what appear to be constantly connected communications, like a phone call.  As previously noted, there are lots of apps that allow you to place free phone calls.  Even video calls.  Generally speaking, for most people, they work just fine.  You can hear the person clearly, and the calls don't drop very often.  And they're free.  Well, somebody is paying something in order to keep the system running, but you, as a user, aren't paying anything.  The cost of actually providing a call is so small that it isn't worth trying to figure out how to charge people for it.

So, we could have a store and forward type of packet switching, on our cell phones, creating a network.  It would be more reliable than our current networks, because you would probably connect with at least half a dozen other cell phones in your vicinity, so that if one of them got turned off, or ran out of battery, or got stolen, or just fried itself to death, it wouldn't matter: your call would continue on the other five channels.  This is what is known as mesh networking, and it's the most reliable form of communications.  When companies set it up it's very expensive.  But it's actually ridiculously simple to get it to set itself up.  The technology underlying the Internet, called TCP/IP, already has provision for mesh networking built into it.  You actually have to dumb it down, and limit it, in order to prevent TCP/IP from connecting to everything around it, and using the channels that it can set up that way, to communicate with anyone and everyone.

So, we can start to set up PeopleNet, or PopulistNet.  These days, pretty much everybody is carrying a cell phone.  The cell phones have networking software and capabilities.  The cell phones all have radio communications channels, to communicate with cell phone towers, wifi connections, and even Bluetooth connections at very short range.  Without the right licenses, we can't use the communications channels the cell phone companies use, but we are free to use the others.

There are an awful lot of people who are already exploring the communications that can be done with cell phones.  There is a set of enthusiasts who work in an area called SDR, or software defined radio.  This means that we can use the computing and data processing capabilities of the computers in the cell phones, and we can make the radios in the cell phones use the channels that they can connect to, in a much wider range of capabilities.  We can change the frequencies of the radios, even if those frequencies are preset in the hardware, by using the preset hardware channels in synchrony with each other to actually broadcast on completely different frequencies.  We can send single data communication streams over multiple different radio channels.  This is not terribly sophisticated networking: it just needs a bit of extra administration.  And the computers are pretty good at keeping track of all of that.  And, over time, they will get much much better.  All we have to do is tell them what we want them to do.  And we already have the knowledge to do that.

So, we have the hardware that we need for PeopleNet.  And the software, to make it work, is either readily available, or in development.  We need to extend the networking capabilities of the phones, at the network layer.  We already know how to do it on the Internet, and we have the software to do it.  It needs only a slight modification to make it work on cell phones.  And then the cell phones can talk to each other, and set up their own networks, without even asking us.  They will just connect to everything they can, find out if the phone that they are connecting to is willing to share in the system, and establish whatever connections can be made.  And then start communicating, sending our email, downloading Mastodon, or setting up our voice over IP calls.  Whatever it is that we want them to do.

Remember how I told you that mesh networking was much more reliable?  And remember that contention model?  Well, the thing with PeopleNet is, it doesn't use the contention model.  You don't have to see a cell tower.  You don't have to be the first one to see the cell tower.  You don't have to fight with other phones to get a connection to the cell tower.  Under the contention model, the more people who have cell phones in a given area, the worse your chance of getting a channel, and the worst the quality of the channel, is.  But with PeopleNet, the more people there are in a given area, the better your reception is.  Because every person, every cell phone that they are carrying, is yet another opportunity to establish a link in the network.  The more links, the more mesh, the more reliability, and the better the quality, as well as the higher the bandwidth that you can use.  You know that fight about 4G and 5G?  The fact that you have to get a 5G phone because 5G gives you more bandwidth and faster access to the Internet?  Well you don't have to worry about that with PeopleNet.  The more people there are in any given area, the more channels you can set up, and the higher the bandwidth that you're going to get, regardless of which particular technology the cell phones want to sell you.

And it's not just cell phones.  Laptops can use, and participate, in this as well.  Older devices; older cell phones and laptops and wifi routers; may not have the power to become part of PeopleNet and still operate as normal, but they can be left plugged in behind desks and under couches, and help form the basic mesh that makes it all work.  As a matter of fact, any network-connected "thing" in the increasingly massive "Internet of Things" can participate and help out.  And a lot of those old devices can help us make the mesh more permanent and durable, and span longer distances.

There is work to be done on PeopleNet.  For one thing, we've probably got to convince some of the open source software people to start developing the necessary pieces that you can download, as apps, and put on your phones, to make it all work.  We've got to have some agreement as to which radio communications frequency bands we're going to use.  We're going to want to avoid flooding wifi networks, and jamming the use of wifi signals, because of what we're doing with PeopleNet.  And, one of the big things, we got to find some way of securing this, since, like the Internet and its inception, it's designed for availability, and not for confidentiality.  But these are areas that we can work on.

Oh, and remember: the Internet was not built by the telcos, as much as they would like you to forget that fact.  The Internet was built by a bunch of grad students who, individually, wanted to do interesting things, and were willing to cooperate and willing to use common protocols and interfaces.  We don't have to build PeopleNet all at once.  We just have to get started in individual areas.

There are other parts of PeopleNet that still need some development.  Certain aspects of networking will have to be extended or refined.  The individual hops are shorter than usual, and timing considerations are unlikely to be of any use.  In addition, the path length is going to be much much longer than is normally the case in networking situations for TCP/IP, and routing tables such as open shortest path first are likely to run into problems in that regard.  Therefore some kind of heuristic will need to be addressed in terms of the path length and routing decisions based on that.  It may be that new types of network decisions will need to be created or implemented.

It may be that a cheat, or compromise, in the form of a connection to the nearest hot spot, and then dumping the data onto the existing Internet, may need to be accomplished in the short term, for early adoption.  However, there is a danger, in pursuing this path, in the case of designing some kind of protocol which will not be able to transfer to a purely PeopleNet networking and routing system.

So, let's get to work.  The sooner we start, the sooner we put the telcos out of business.