Personally, the additional complexity and overheads required for a P2P phone network is not worth while and I'm not sure it would fix that many problems that haven't already been fixed with walkie talkies.
It’s not “too hard”. It’s physically impossible without regulation. There is but one limited RF spectrum that we all share. One bad actor (intentional or misconfigured) can render the entire RF spectrum in their area unusable. The radius of their impact only depends on how much kWHs they have access to and it doesn’t take much to cripple radio communication in a large metropolitan area.
Until some clever cookie can figure out some way to utilize string theory’s extra dimensions for sending signals and then every body can have their own dimension to mess with, collective regulation on broadcasters is the only feasible way.
Nothing is stopping you from getting an HT for communication during power outages, natural disasters, etc. You just have to get a license to make sure you don’t actively harm everyone who is sharing the same spectrum with you especially during said natural disaster.
Theoretically people could cripple RF comms on accident, in reality that almost never happens despite many people possessing devices able to do so. My mikrotik router will let me broadcast all sorts of illegal signals with a few clicks inside their GUI, and yet I never heard about problems with people crippling city blocks with bad router settings. Or from their weird microwave setups. Or trying to run and operate some dilapidated 60 year old radios.
That’s because almost any legal to sell consumer device gets an FCC certification. It can still cause interference, but within limited parameters that significantly limit the blast radius. Most of the interference people experience will be very limited and almost exclusively due to misconfigured or defective devices. Ham operators run into this occasionally and if memory serves correctly, there was a chapter in the ham license exam about how to identify potential bad RF source and how to handle it (the FCC usually recommend politely letting the person with a bad transmitter know that their TV antenna or generator or whatever is causing RF interference before you involve the authorities as most people who encounter this are simply unaware)
The situation would be very different if it were commercially legal to sell devices that are designed to let you broadcast to anyone without FCC certification on the device or enforcement from a governing body. A billion startups would be selling “communicate with your family across town for free” devices that can easily render emergency services radios useless in a city.
Not true. Bluetooth, lora, and zigbee all coexist in the same unlicensed spectrum just fine. There’s no reason phones couldn’t speak these, or that a similar low-power protocol couldn’t be standardized.
> One bad actor can render the entire RF spectrum in their area unusable.
Ok, and? That’s already true for cellular, gps, and wifi today.
> Nothing is stopping you from getting an HT for communication during power outages, natural disasters, etc.
You’re missing the point. People already carry radios everywhere which are more than capable of longer range p2p communications.
The real question is why no such standard exists, despite its obvious utility.
Telling people to just carry an HT is smug and irrelevant. Average people carry phones.
> Not true. Bluetooth, lora, and zigbee all coexist in the same unlicensed spectrum just fine. There’s no reason phones couldn’t speak these, or that a similar low-power protocol couldn’t be standardized.
They already do. Most phones have Bluetooth. All those examples run on the 2.4GHz spectrum and all have the same RF range limitations and challenges. What’s your point?
> Ok, and? That’s already true for cellular, gps, and wifi today.
Hence the enforcement of cellular bands and gps through regulation. Again I’m confused as to what you are trying to say? Anyone can cause an RF jam. It’s illegal. Depending on how much it impact others, you might get a visit from the FCC, a fine or jail.
> You’re missing the point. People already carry radios everywhere which are more than capable of longer range p2p communications.
No they are not. You can’t get more than very short line of sight communication on the UHF band. You need to drop to at least the VHF band for any reasonable non-assisted communication and even still most people communicating in the VHF bands are using repeaters.
> The real question is why no such standard exists, despite its obvious utility.
You just listed 3 standards. Their utility is extremely limited and very unreliable as the distance, foliage, concrete increases between the parties. Telling anyone to rely on UHF transceiver in an emergency is misleading and dangerous. Telling anyone who is worried about communication in an actual emergency situation to have an HT is not smug. It’s the tool you need for the job. Average people carry phones because they are not frequently in such emergency situations. Those who are (emergency services, hardcore hikers, snow skiers, wild adventure types carry radios or satellite phones for this reason.
Plus with the recent low orbit satellite constellations making it possible to fit compatible transceiver in small phones (as opposed to needing a huge antenna for it) it’s even more of a moot point for emergency situations now.
You’re not gonna change antenna theory because you feel it’s smug.
If you’re saying “phones can’t replace VHF radios or repeaters for reliable long-range comms”, agreed. Nobody disputes antenna theory, and nobody is arguing for unregulated or high-power transmitters.
But if you’re saying “because of those limits, phone-native p2p shouldn’t exist at all”, that conclusion does not follow. Limited range and imperfect reliability still permit real, local, best-effort use cases, several of which have already been raised in this thread.
The point is precisely to fill the gaps, so phones aren’t completely useless when you can’t reach a cell tower and don’t have an HT handy. Most people will never carry radio gear, but will have a phone on them when something goes wrong.
The point is exactly that everybody is carrying a phone, but almost nobody is carrying a walkie-talkie. And why should I carry one more thing? My smartphone has already replaced my music player, camera...
