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
Basically the reasons everyone else has stated, but…there’s more.
In order to do both (well, all 4 actually) your cell phone would need 4 different antenna, each of which use power all the time (all 4: SMS, cell service, wifi service, and now walloe-talkie radio) and each of which operates at different frequencies with different protocols. We’re already pretty lucky that voice-based cell service is still included (as opposed to VOiP which would operate SMS and Voice signals across an internet-based relay: you can tell when you get these types of calls because they’re always scratchy and dropping pieces). So…there’s hardware requirements, power requirements, firmware requirements AND software requirements that all have to work together and only interfere the way *you* want then to interfere with one another (imagine getting a walkie call whole you’re already on a cell call: which one gets the speaker? Which the mic? Can you control it or is pre-programmed by type of phone). And there’s the fact that even with 8-fold data compression, we’re running out of frequencies available for use. Imagine suddenly increasing the frequency demand by 5 billion users overnight (that’s what adding walkie service would require based on an estimated number of cell phones in active use in the world right now, with that number only likely to go up in the future as cars are added to the cell service mix).
All in all, its just not worth the headache, even if you discount a few of those points as just engineering challenges.
Latest Answers