What kind of communication scheme for phones without mobile network service might we come up with? There's bluetooth and wifi. Would need to be store-and-forward. Address-less.
Why don't we have one? Doesn't have to be so damn chatty. "Here's that song/document I mentioned" (transfer). Bump, face to face auth. No more, no less.
Here's what I've been thinking is eminently doable. Set aside all assumptions about the (social commercial whatever) needs requirements and such. Its a thought experiment, partly, about how we might use phones without mobile data networks.
Short range -- face to face or dozen feet. Specifically limited range. No intent or utility in long range here.
Assume wifi or BT radio.
A phone app that contains a public key pair (public, private) and a name/handle that's public (or nul).
App can ping/listen continuously, or only on a touch/tap. When so enacted, displays public names of others of itself in range.
Nice and dumb. That's the basic mechanism. But there's more!
REPOSITORY: a feature with dials, including off, max file size or count, whatever.
You can turn on repository on your phone app, and accept files for others-not-you-or-friend (limits on size count, or none). When you meet a friend and xfer file(s), you can optionally take on further delivery as a favor.
Files can have ICMP like TTL and timestamps; undelivered for 30 days, dropped.
So your phone can be silent and only exchange upon manual act, or be promiscuous and act as a public gateway walking down the sidewalk, or in between.
Put "big" repositories, public and large, in common places. Promiscuous or not, etc. Stand near one, press a button -- files for me? -- or upload, or is done automatically if you've set up that way -- and walk away.
Nothing here requires any new tech, it's all old boring shit.
I think. Can BT be used without OS requirements for pairing?
@tomjennings it's baffling that this kind of thing hasn't been implemented properly on any mobile phone that i've seen. apple added "NameDrop" via nfc in some recent update - but it's limited to sharing Contacts - and how the hell did that take 15 years to make?
@tomjennings it reminds me of something i learned from watching that Blackberry movie a few months ago - "we're not interested in selling minutes to people anymore. we sell data to them now."
it would be fun to make the concept of "limited data" commercially meaningless for these providers.
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