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
UK and EU Police have phones that do that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Trunked_Radio
there still exists [push to talk](https://www.motorolasolutions.com/en_us/products/command-center-software/broadband-ptt-and-lmr-interoperability.html) as an add on option. makes the phones act as walkie-talkies to each other. maybe specific phone models? and im sure the is some account setup to make it work. its not out of the box. and not on every phone.
they can.. it was called PTT (push to talk) no one ever used it and they stopped adding the feature
There’s functionality called LTE Direct (aka ProSe). I think it was only ever rolled out in South Korea, but it’s part of the LTE standard.
Didn’t Nextel do this with their phones? You could use them like walkies over cell phone distances?
Many years ago my husband and I had cell phones with a walkie talkie feature. We could only walkie talkie each other. The bad thing was, anyone could hear what you said. We seldom used it.
Radio connection strength relies on both the strength of the transmitting antenna and the strength of the receiving antenna. Cell phones have small antennas so they can be thin and light, and cell towers have really big antennas to compensate for the weak antennas in the phone. If you tried to connect two phones, neither one has a strong antenna, so they could only connect when they’re close to each other.
If you want to connect two nearby cell phones that are in the same room, it’s probably simpler to use the wifi or bluetooth antennas.
~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)
Okay so Samsung had a feature like this back in the earlier 2000’s. My ex husband and I purchased 2 Samsung rugbys that had this capability. The phones each had a button on the side that we could push to communicate with one another directly, although I don’t think we ever used it. I’m not sure but (for the sake of common sense) I’ll say I think they only worked up to so many miles..
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