Communication App Works Without a Cellular Network – MIT Technology Review
Communication App Works Without a Cellular Network
- by Rachel Metz
- December Ten, 2014
Many places still lack reliable wireless network service.
A fresh smartphone app lets you send text messages to your friends without a Wi-Fi or cellular network. It could make it a lot simpler to stay in touch wherever there are slew of other people but the normal networks are either overcharged or nonexistent.
Called MeshMe, the app permits you to talk with several people at a time while your phone is in airplane mode as long as you keep Wi-Fi or Bluetooth radio on. An iPhone MeshMe app was released last month, and an Android version is expected to be ready in several months, MeshMe CEO Jory Schwach says.
MeshMe uses what’s known as mesh networking: it treats each smartphone running the app as a router, passing data from one handset to the next to get messages to recipients via the most efficient pathway. Even if you’re acting as a knot in this network, you can’t read data sent over MeshMe unless it is routed to you, Schwach says.
Mesh networking is increasingly used to help people keep in touch even when out of network range (see “Build Your Own Internet with Mobile Mesh Networking”). An app called FireChat has a “nearby” talk room that permits you to send messages to anyone within thirty meters of you (see “The Latest Talk App for iPhone Needs No Internet Connection”).
MeshMe lets you talk with anyone, as long as a message can reach them via other MeshMe users. It can find contacts by combing your phone’s address book or your Facebook profile.
When you send another MeshMe user a message, your phone asks devices nearby if they know the person you’re looking for; if those devices do not, the message is passed on to other users. Once your phone finds a good path, it can route the data; and if the network switches (say, someone turns off her phone), MeshMe will attempt to find a fresh route.
Schwach says the distance over which MeshMe will work varies according to the amount of wireless signal interference in the area (which increases if there are more phone-toting people around). The iPhone six should be able to transfer data via MeshMe at a distance of about twenty to thirty meters using Wi-Fi. Over Bluetooth, it’s more like ten to fifteen meters.
In one test, the startup placed a person with MeshMe running on an iPhone on each floor of a 13-floor building, and it took less than half a 2nd to send a message from the user on the ground floor to the user on the top floor.
In my limited practice, MeshMe didn’t always work. I attempted it with my iPhone and one belonging to a coworker, and for some reason I could only get the app to send messages one way while the handsets were in airplane mode and their Wi-Fi radios were turned on. After setting it up with a 2nd coworker’s iPhone, however, it worked fine, and messages sometimes arrived quicker than they did when routed over a regular wireless network.
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