The tiny cube that could cut your cell phone bill

...must be connected to something. Fiber optics, maybe?

I could see them, one every couple of telephone poles, taking the place of the huge towers.

But where I live, there are lots of relatively scattered towns with farms between them. Service is spotty in the space between here and the coast only because it's not profitable. I'm not certain this would make that much of a difference in rural areas, simply because they must be fed from somewhere.

Big Brother will have an even easier job of tracking you with those.

I've attended FOSDEM, were t Mesh networking

Bob: Not fiber optics, I think copper. See below:





Only red is fiber.

Image is linked from Alcatel Lucent.

TA: Most of our gadgets do have an 'off' button, though barely anybody uses them. It's sad there's not some kind of 'private standby' mode, where you're not traced; like the private browsing mode in browsers.

Quoting:It's sad there's not some kind of 'private standby' mode, where you're not traced; like the private browsing mode in browsers

There is airplane mode.

We could make millions developing Faraday shield/cage purses.

Or: Chainmail - protects you from swords AND snooping

Copper, sure. So coverage in congested areas may very well improve and smooth out, but more pleasent, open territory will still be badly served by the necessity of back-hauling the data.

I guess we who prefer mountains and forests will have to wait until subspace-based communicators are invented. :^)

> We could make millions developing Faraday shield/cage purses.

Or just turn them off.

Quoting: We could make millions developing Faraday shield/cage purses.

They already have that for credit cards with RFID tags built in.