Looks awesome! But I'm curious how this will work regarding battery? My phone is most days dead before I hit the subway home - which is a big drag. Wont this drain my battery even more?
@salmiak Great question. So the answer is yes and no. Anyfi runs on the Wi-Fi band alone, which consumes less battery than your LTE connection. This is because LTE requires much longer range transmission, which requires more juice.
However, if you are seeding the network for many devices, then depending on how many devices are connected to you / what sort of traffic they are consuming, your device could consume lots of battery. Example: if 50 devices in the mesh are consuming HD video and you are the sole relay link, then that would consume battery very quickly.
Mathematically, such a lopsided network topology is very unlikely, as densely populated networks will usually have many gateway links to the Internet.
In a highly mobile environment (downtown thoroughfare) Anyfi may lead to repeated connects/disconnects, which may again consume lots of battery.
Hey guys, in case it isn't visible, our demo app is available on the Google Play store: https://play.google.com/store/ap...
You need to install Anyfi on all the devices for them to get connectivity.
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This could be great on airplanes. If someone buys the premium internet, they could share access to everyone else! 😄 It might be nice to host a landing page so you can offer access by following on social or advertising a brand/portfolio etc!
@tombielecki Sure! I'm actually hoping the cost of airborne broadband falls quickly enough that airlines start offering it as a complimentary service, but we must not always rely so heavily on corporate goodwill...
Who's paying for the internet source? If you're on my connection and you're streaming large amounts of data wouldn't the person the signal originated from still be paying for all the bandwidth?
If I understand this right four phones that are all connected to one phone would send all that data through one phone's connection, doesn't that drain battery life fairly quickly? Would this just be a matter of reaching critical mass so that this scenario doesn't happen often?
How will this compete with Comcast's "xfinitywifi" networks it broadcasts from it's modems? That's the one I use when I'm out atm and about but I pay for it.
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Honestly, this is what Silicon Valley talks about. In the future, this could be huge. Like replace cell networks huge.
It's a really great concept I wrote a whitepaper on a while ago for use in disaster areas and zones. It was a pet project based on a prototype built at a hack day but we found that past a certain number of devices, the issue became crowding of available spectrum and time slots so we found the routing to be a pain to keep a consistent level of packet throughput. As the devices broadcast further in some cases than other the relays become part of the problem as if you have more than 3-4 hops you would start getting devices using up all bandwidth in overhead on the relays themselves so it would have to dynamically change the routes based on packet loss of each relay node in turn because as they come in/out of service based on device use.
The other issue we had was the allocation of bandwidth as usually the backhaul was either paid for over a 4G connection or a very limited wifi connection from a provider such as a coffee shops. But then again we were working under conditions of what if there were only 2 or 3 nodes with connections and several hundred devices needing access to data services in a disaster recovery setting.
Really nice product however and I think you guys will be able to solve these given technology has moved on a lot and 802.11ac and fast switching now exists since then
@ne0 Thanks for your insight! We've definitely run across some of these challenges before. If you have a spare half-hour, would love to chat with you to learn from your insight and experience. Please email me at do@anyfi.io.
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I've been looking into phone based mesh networks for years and various projects and attempts ... decentralized crowdsourced internet access is the future and anyfi looks like it could be an important component ... would love to talk more.
@jochendo Agreed. Please get in touch; you can find me on Facebook (Do Kwon), or shoot me an email --> do@anyfi.io.
Would love to hear more about your previous mesh related endeavors.
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