On 3/21/2011 3:41 PM, Paul Gardner-Stephen wrote:
A further comment on leveraging the network effect is to<broken record mode>collaborate with various related projects to create a much larger combined community earlier than any of us can do alone</broken record mode>.
Yep. This is very true.
My suggestion is to pick something that people have to pay for today, that we can offer for free tomorrow. To me the obvious choice is telephony: VoIP is already fairly well proven, and people hate phone bills.
This is true. It's only recently that we have the necessary systems/software/low cost per port that allows us to compete with the traditional telcos in an end to end fashion (operation and business support systems, network (global SIP platform), devices (android on open handsets) .
It won't be free though. However it can be delivered at a substantially lower cost. I've talked with a few people about building a global scale IP telephony routing platform that can compete with the existing SS7 system. We are at the infancy of technology that can give us a competitive solution. It's on the drawing board, and I'm convinced that it can be done in the next 5 years. We now have google experimenting with delivering a global SIP platform. Others are working on it as well. I feel that it's necessary to bootstrap the system, instead of it being done by google etc.
This means you have to be able to use existing phone numbers, and just have it work.
Hmmmm. Yes this is true. Existing phone numbers, completely new routing system.
(This introduces some authentication issues, which I can talk about separately, and also some tragedy of the commons issues, which I can also talk about, i.e., how to create incentives for people to keep their device on and contributing to the mesh).
Well they want to be able to receive phone calls. This would mean their phone is on and meshed.
I like it.
The number management has to be completely distributed as well, and there has to be support for using the internet to limit the local mesh size to deal with scalability.
Yeah. No more NANPA. Though I am curious as to the limits of self organization. Do we need some sort of distributed authority? Hmmm. I guess I should be starting these
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