Peep Wireless: Peer-to-Peer Mesh Networks for Developing World Cell Phone Users

With nearly 5 billion mobile phone users worldwide, mobile networks are the most powerful communication technology systems today. But they are still centralized, top-down networks wherein a cellular provider disseminates signal to receiving devices. Revealed at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show, a new mesh network technology by Peep Wireless promises a decentralized, lateral alternative to existing networks. Using peer-to-peer technology, users would be able to share access to other mobile devices, essentially extending the reach of the network by transforming each mobile device into a mini-cell-towers capable of receiving data and transmitting it to other devices.

Mesh networks, of course, aren’t a new concept. Though developed much earlier, they have been applied mainly to wi-fi technology and were arguably introduced into mainstream awareness by Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project, which employed a peer-to-peer wi-fi mesh network between the devices, often deployed in areas of the developing world where cellular networks have little or no coverage.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/v/125dT7QNEKc?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

But what makes Peep’s concept particularly timely and promising is that it can transform any mobile device, from the simplest single-function phone to the latest i-Whatever, into a miniature cell tower — a powerful proposition at a time when net neutrality debates are violently ablaze and the prospect of communication monopolies is looming with more doom than ever. Though conceived with the developing world in mind — where mesh networks are not only faster and cheaper to build but can even be more robust — Peep’s technology has the potential to be even more disruptive in the developed world, providing not only a technological revolution but also an ideological paradigm shift that democratizes communication systems and offers a viable alternative to Big Telecom.

via Shareable

Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of miscellaneous interestingness. She writes for Wired UK, GOOD Magazine, Design Observer and Huffington Post, and spends a shameful amount of time on Twitter.