ON THE surface the latest social-messaging app, FireChat, is unremarkable. Like other such apps it can be used to exchange messages and photos, anonymously if desired. FireChat, however, is different from its rivals in one crucial respect: there is no need for those using it to be connected to a mobile-phone or Wi-Fi network. Instead, it lets phones talk directly to one another. Its developer, Open Garden, a firm based in San Francisco, has taken advantage of a little-known feature of Apple’s iOS 7 mobile operating system (clumsily dubbed the “multipeer connectivity framework”) that allows phones to link up using either the Bluetooth or the Wi-Fi wireless protocols, to form ad hoc networks of their own.These “mesh networks”—in which devices within range of each other form “daisy chains” that relay messages over whatever distance a chain stretches—mean that two users need not be in direct range of one another to communicate. And if one chain fails to deliver, the system can route around the problem by trying a second, just like its big brother, the internet.All this requires, of course, enough smartphones and tablets around in a place for daisy chains to be established. Micha Benoliel, one of Open Garden’s founders, reckons that in practice this means a 7-8% take-up of the devices in an urban area. Clearly, mesh networking is not going to work everywhere, but its need for a...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1k488M8
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