Why can’t cellphones connect to each other directly, acting like walkie talkies, at distances similar to their ability to reach cell towers.
In: 80
~10 years ago a wifi standard called “ad hoc” wifi networking was developed. Originally available in certain laptop models, it allowed standard wifi devices to connect to each other (i.e. laptop to laptop) without needing a wifi router.
Early versions of Android (maybe around versions 1 and 2) could be modified (installing a patched “wpa_supplicant” file, running a modified OS, or using Linux tools) to access the ad hoc wifi network feature. This allowed for phone to phone, or phone to laptop networks, (and led to the idea of a large device to device network, a mesh network). There were some attempts at walkie talkie android apps that used the ad hoc network, however each new version of Android added hurdles to accessing this feature.
A rumor is the telecom companies did not like the idea of future competition from “mesh networks”, and leveraged Android to exclude support for ad hoc networking.
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22291905/how-patch-android-4-4-2-wpa-supplicant-for-adhoc-wifi](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22291905/how-patch-android-4-4-2-wpa-supplicant-for-adhoc-wifi)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_ad_hoc_network#Threats_to_telcos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_ad_hoc_network#Threats_to_telcos)
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