13 ms·

Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone

298 points by 4d66ba06 8y ago

sliken 8y ago
I'd happily put a large omnidirectional wifi antenna on my roof to help out with something like this.... if I could get a fair rate for the bandwidth used. My city has 70k people or so, and is perfectly flat. Similarly I'd be willing to help with any p2p type wireless, with a radio, antenna, and raspberry Pi or similar. Sadly most p2p wireless <-> internet gateways are proprietary.
- anonymous5133 8y ago
  I've always wondered about this as well. Get independent hobbyists to setup micro wifi networks. Run all traffic through a vpn or some sort so the operator doesn't risk their IP/ISP banning their service. Monetize the whole thing on a pay as you go service. $1/gb and give 70 cents of that to the independent operators. The big telecoms already have these little mini-wifi networks in bigger cities that you can get access to but only if you are a subscriber to their services. For me personally I would definitely pay the $1/gb to get access to such a network. Right now, I only use my cell data for e-mail and light web browsing. The cost of 3g/4g data is simply too expensive for me.
  - sliken 8y ago
    I pay $0.05 per GB or so at home ($60 per TB). I'd happily sell my data at a small profit just to offset whatever the equipment is that's required. Someone else on this thread mentioned gotenna, which seemed like a similarly cool idea. Unfortunately they rejected the idea of allowing gotenna <-> internet <-> gotenna via a gateway I offered to write. They already have a unique id per device and I was going to use a DHT to allow all the gateways to track which user was behind which gateway. Seemed like a killer app to me, after all why limit who you message to being within 2-3 hops of you... why not allow the other few billion folks on the planet? Sadly they wouldn't allow access to the underlying mesh meta data and instead required using their extremely limited API. Having near free widgets that can mesh at low bandwidth (think SMS and IM like bandwidths) and then pay per GB for faster links seems like an excellent idea. I can imagine having phones/tablets without a $50 per month WAN charge if it could mesh and use wifi. Would be handy for sensor networks, home security, public safety monitoring (like cars going the wrong way on the highway), etc.
    - ricardobeat 8y ago
      LoRa might enable this, and easily reaches 10-20km range (up to 100km in theory). A lot of projects in Europe experimenting with it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
    - ixwt 8y ago
      This would be a great feature for gotenna. Especially if places near where you would be using a gotenna have internet access.
      - sliken 8y ago
        Well the gotenna network is pretty slow, and internet is not particularly friendly to store and forward with high latencies. I was thinking more along the lines of sharing your location (like APRS) and SMS/IM type traffic. That way you could have cover a large area with minimal infrastructure.
  - klaushardt 8y ago
    In Germany there is exactly this for free. https://freifunk.net/en/ https://freifunk.net/en/ Altough its far away from good coverage you get free wifi here and there. Especially Coffee Shops and in Big Citys.
  - samirm 8y ago
    There's things like https://www.nycmesh.net/ https://www.nycmesh.net/, https://tomesh.net/ https://tomesh.net/ and a bunch of others I can't find right now.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - Tazmanian 8y ago
    Have been trying to do that for many years now first with the EFF scheme "openwireless.org", then with soprani.ca. https://wom.community/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/operatives https://wom.community/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/operatives. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/595zg5/sopranica-jmp-wom-cell-network-diy-anonymous https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/595zg5/sopranica-... Even have a good VPN supplier picked out. But these people are always talk and theory, never a simple blueprint for a standardized design. Guess it's always like this :( I'm not terribly impressed with the Tor organization either. The public really needs a way to bypass these lying thieving carriers and these gubmint bullshit artists wanting to keep their jobs. But without some sort of credible leadership - such alternatives will never exist.
- woah 8y ago
  Check out althea.org
josh2600 8y ago
I would bet almost any amount of money this isn’t going to work. In any mesh network, the overhead of coordinating nodes dominates network traffic. This is before you even begin to think about the terms of service violations for all of these WiFi access points.
- angott 8y ago
  And you haven't even mentioned the fact that mobile phones can move around, leading to high rates of dropped connections as devices come and go. There's no way this is going to work.
  - remyM 8y ago
    Whoops, my phone connected to someone on a train that just went past! My phone call just dropped.
    - sliken 8y ago
      Think of it the opposite way. You have no coverage, are trying to get a message out and the nearest gateway is miles away. A moving car/train is close to you for plenty of time to transfer a few 100 bytes, and someone in the car/train has a mesh aware widget. It stores a copy and waits to go near a gateway where it upload it for you. Sure, it's not as nice as a WAN connection, but the average cellular contract is pretty expensive per month. Something like $10 per GB, and often a $30 and up base rate. So sure, long distance multi-hop mesh stinks for real time voice, but could be quite usable for other use cases.
      - mirashii 8y ago
        Ah, but now you're talking about solving an additional problem, delay tolerant networking, on top of mesh networking. This adds a whole new layer of complexity on top of the mesh network, and would probably only work as you say for a subset of services that are made to handle this type of unreliable network. Also many common delay tolerant network implementations rely on message replication to increase the probability of delivery of the message. This puts additional bandwidth strain on the inter-node hops of the network, which as some of the other commenters pointed out, not actually all that high.
doitLP 8y ago
I don’t get the invite model. Ask someone already invited to send you an invite? I guess it prevents spam reservations but I don’t have Facebook or twitter, so I guess I’m out of luck.
- mdaniel 8y ago
  I was also curious, and found https://volkfi.com/whyinvite https://volkfi.com/whyinvite which has a constructive sounding heading > Why is Volk Fi invite-only followed by blather blather about the technology and then finally some invite-sounding text of > But, because Volk Fi is crowdsourced, it needs a certain user density in order to have full coverage and reliability which seems to run directly in contradiction to why one would want the system to be invite-only. Can you imagine starting a BitTorrent service, and then trying to ensure the swarm stayed small by only telling your roommates? I guess that's why I'm not in marketing.
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    Makes complete sense to me. The assumption probably is that people you invite are usually close to you.
  - taneq 8y ago
    I'm guessing so they don't get people signing up where there are no other users anywhere nearby, and then posting bad reviews when their device never connects to any other devices.
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    Speaking of Bittorrent... This is a YC '19 company and... https://igamerss.com/index.php/2019/03/19/here-are-the-85-st.. https://igamerss.com/index.php/2019/03/19/here-are-the-85-st.... "Volk Wi-fi: Volk is making an Android smartphone with a free information plan, no service required. The co-founders say they’re utilizing long-range wi-fi to share connections and construct a community of telephones. Co-Founder Greg Hazel was the Chief Architect at Bittorrent, whereas co-founder Straya Markovic was the lead engineer at mesh messaging platform Firechat." So yeah, they should know better.
nickodell 8y ago
>Volk One devices can connect to each other, from several miles away. Assuming that a voice call requires 8kbit/s of bandwidth, and assuming that you have about a watt of power, how feasible is it to connect through a phone that is a mile away? Serious question - I don't know how to do the math here.
- slackfan 8y ago
  Several miles? Sure, maybe, if conditions are good and you're line-of-sight. Good luck turning every phone into a cellphone tower. This seems like an overly optimistic scam.
- amenghra 8y ago
  If you want to learn how to do the math, this is old but a good starting point: http://www.ti.com/lit/ml/slap127/slap127.pdf http://www.ti.com/lit/ml/slap127/slap127.pdf (In general, radio engineering is taught at college-level and requires some basic math/physica if you are going with “rules of thumb” and fairly advanced math if you want to understand/derive exact equations).
- int_19h 8y ago
  One watt wouldn't be a problem at that distance, but any frequency this can operate on requires line-of-sight or close to it. "Several miles away" might be realistic in the middle of a desert, but in areas with hills or lots of large buildings? Not likely. Generally speaking, line-of-sight is almost always what limits point-to-point comm range for handhelds, rather than raw power. On higher frequencies, even vegetation can be a big deal.
- ac29 8y ago
  Trivial with the correct infrastructure - you can easily get 8kbps in 12.5kHz of bandwidth (a reasonably common channel size in the sub-GHz bands). Trick is, you ideally need line of site (in which case your effective range is effectively the horizon), and directional antennas for distances more than a relatively short distance (a few miles maybe). Some math follows. 30dBm is 1 W, and -100dBm is a low, but probably workable signal. We'll assume 0 antenna gain or loss to make the math easier. Free Space Path Loss (in dB): 20×log10(d) + 20×log10(f) + 92.45 d=distance in km, f=frequency in GHz So at 915MHz, we can get about 85km in free space @ 915MHz (this is actually past the horizon, so not really possible except from high elevations). 30dBm − (20×log10(85) + 20×log10(.915) +92.45) = -100dBm
TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
How can internet connectivity be free? Doesn’t someone need to pay for a connection?
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  To answer my own question, as per the FAQ: Volk Fi counts data usage and bytes shared via WiFi. Every user gets the amount they share, unlimited. If a Volk user consumes more data than they share in a month, there is a 5GB data cap. After that, the user can pay the super cheap price of $1/GB for additional data.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
    I would love for this to be just an app on a standard Android device.
    - xiphias2 8y ago
      I would gladly pay with Bitcoin on the Lightning network to get internet access, but the market is not ready yet.
    - amorphic 8y ago
      Apparently because their special phones have "new, long-range radio hardware" that makes this all possible. But radio technologies are pretty widely understood and while I'm no expert I've not heard of anything that could achieve what they're suggesting. So I'll remain skeptical until I understand better what that "long-range radio hardware" is and how it makes such a mesh network feasible.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    Ah, yet another carrier offering Unlimited* data.
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    So as someone who starts out with a YC '19 * Volk Fi phone, your sharing will be at 0, and therefore immediately subject to a 5GB data cap with $1/gb afterward. Uh huh. In the old days, we called this a "Multilevel Marketing scam". (And the best part is that I would pay for my own internet line, AND pay for my phone use use my internet line.) * https://igamerss.com/index.php/2019/03/19/here-are-the-85-startups-that-launched-at-ycs-w19-demo-day-1-techcrunch/ https://igamerss.com/index.php/2019/03/19/here-are-the-85-st... "Volk Wi-fi: Volk is making an Android smartphone with a free information plan, no service required. The co-founders say they’re utilizing long-range wi-fi to share connections and construct a community of telephones. Co-Founder Greg Hazel was the Chief Architect at Bittorrent, whereas co-founder Straya Markovic was the lead engineer at mesh messaging platform Firechat."
slackfan 8y ago
These data collection scams are getting more and more elaborate.
CKN23-ARIN 8y ago
(YC '19)
amenghra 8y ago
Sounds a bit like Fon from the 2005s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fon_(company) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fon_(company)
int_19h 8y ago
This makes a bit more sense: "Every Volk phone has a SIM card slot and supports use on traditional LTE networks. However, a SIM is not necessary and the phone will always prioritize the Volk network first. The Volk network works as such: every Volk user gets a special router with their phone. The router acts as a wireless Qi charging pad also. The router connects to your existing internet via Ethernet or something similar. The router is what connects phones to Volk and allows calls, texts, and data to go through. If a router isn't nearby, the phone will try to find another Volk phone to use as a hop, until it finally reaches a router. All Volk phones have strong radios and can go more than half a mile if terrain is clear. If there are no routers or Volk phones nearby to hop to, you'll either not have service, have to use Wifi, or fallback to LTE if you have a SIM card installed and it has active service." (https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/aq3hul/volk_fi_claims_it_gets_reception_everyone_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/aq3hul/volk_fi_claim...) So the backbone of the mesh network is their charging stations / routers, and phones can (?) mesh but not necessarily that far. What I still don't like about this is that nowhere they talk about the frequencies on which they operate, not even in the "Specs" section of the website. This makes it very hard to verify any range claims they make.
- sinak 8y ago
  The frequencies are what I was curious about as well. To have a half mile range at relatively low powers it would need to be a low frequency band. I'm guessing they haven't bought licenses from the FCC, so my bet is that they're using the 900 MHz ISM band. There's only 26 MHz of spectrum in that band, which isn't much, particularly for a mesh setup that won't be particularly spectrally efficient. Even with a high 30 dB signal to noise ratio, the Shannon channel capacity in a 26 MHz band is 50 Mbps. MIMO helps a bit, but even in ideal real-world conditions you'll likely have at most 50 Mbps to share between all the users connected to a node. Spread that across a few users/mesh hops, throw in some packet retransmissions and noise, and it's not nearly enough to compete with LTE networks at any meaningful user density. Incentivizing users to create as many nodes as possible is a good idea, as that allows lower power transmissions and better frequency reuse. It's still a huge struggle to get anywhere near commercial wireless speeds, particularly in areas where there are fewer nodes and a higher density of users.
teamspirit 8y ago
When I first heard about Project Fi, this is what I imagined it to be like. I was a little disappointed when I found out it was just glorified wifi-calling.
jewel 8y ago
This sounds great. One idea I had to stop abuse was to force traffic from a phone to route out to the public Internet through its own base station. That would require a lot of hops, in some cases, but the traffic could short circuit through others' base stations back to their own through the Internet, without originating the traffic from the intermediaries. I wrote up more about this here: https://stevenjewel.com/2014/01/android-mesh/ https://stevenjewel.com/2014/01/android-mesh/ In this particular case they could originate the traffic from Volk servers instead. Also, people here may be interested in GoTenna, a portable mesh network hotspot that has been out for a few years, at roughly $75 each.
chpmrc 8y ago
Very interesting. This website is completely unusable on Chrome 72 (MacBook Pro 15" Mid-2015) but is smooth as butter on Safari.
- yoz 8y ago
  Weird, it seems to be totally smooth for me on Chrome 72 (MacBook Pro 13" 2017).
- Matthias247 8y ago
  It's absolutely unusable for me on Safari. Scrolling is less than 1fps. Haven't tried another browser.
  - ksec 8y ago
    Same here. It was literally killing my CPU.
woah 8y ago
This will have Gotenna like speeds, that is it will take several seconds to send a small text message. That’s in an optimistic scenario where the recipient is within a mile or two of you. In a mesh scenario, the speed is going to go way down. In an area urban enough that there are other VolkFi owners to mesh through, there is almost always going to be cell service. It’s just a gimmick to let them sell some slightly modified Android phones. My guess is that they will almost always be connected through the cellular network. If the user would then like to imagine that they are connected to some kind of physics-defying mesh network, I suppose that’s nice. They could probably save on production costs by omitting the 900mhz chip with almost no effect on the service.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  The claim is that they'll always prioritize Volk over LTE. Which is an interesting promise, because if you're correct, they'd potentially be prioritizing the slower connection.
sequoia 8y ago
Website just about crashed my browser. I hope I can find out what it's about here.
- weddpros 8y ago
  confirmed... worst website experience this far in 2019! and I tried both Chrome and Safari! Seriously Volk Fi: fix this asap (like before you continue working on your business)
Aloha 8y ago
This is a product I might buy - if I could actually buy it.
kwhitefoot 8y ago
The hard part will be getting enough such mobiles out in the market for the mesh to ever work and getting the price down low enough for people who are not ever so interested to buy it. Presumably this is using something like Wimax so it shouldn't be difficult for other players to introduce compatible devices. In fact it should be possible to make a Wimax version of the portable Mifi routers that connect to mobile networks then you could use your existing devices and some kind of VOIP solution.
viraptor 8y ago
I like the idea, but I'm not sure how the abuse will work on those networks. There are two possible cases: 1. Volk data goes out via their gateway (proxied): They get access to your data. Their IPs get CloudFlare captchas all the time. (Like tor) 2. Volk data goes out from your router: You get to explain the CP access from your network. Your home IP gets CloudFlare captchas all the time. You get to monitor random people's traffic. Which option is it?
- dpwm 8y ago
  > Which option is it? "no more censorship" doesn't seem like a claim that can exist with option 2 – because they're crowd-sourcing carriers, and carriers censor. So if their marketing is consistent – and ruling out a large-scale reorganization of the internet to be more decentralized – then it's option 1. Option 1 also means that carriers can kill internet connectivity relatively trivially to these devices. Countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar and China will do this if it becomes a big enough threat to their internet censorship endeavors.
- buildbuildbuild 8y ago
  Our approach at NYC Mesh is to give each donor of home internet a router which VPNs all mesh traffic through our ASN. This boosts privacy and neutrality for our mesh users, and protects transit donors from their ISP's interpretation of the traffic.
- gruez 8y ago
  >Their IPs get CloudFlare captchas all the time. (Like tor) This doesn’t seem to be a that much of a problem with commercial VPN providers. Maybe the good actors outnumber the bad actors?
boulevard 8y ago
There will be serious security concerns with this, opening so many possibilities for Man in the Middle attack.
- gruez 8y ago
  Just encrypt everything in transit ?
tomglynch 8y ago
I'm concerned that providing a bounce for someone else's call will use large amount of battery. This means, trying to conserve battery won't be possible if people keep using your phone to bounce off.
max_ 8y ago
This is slightly off-topic, but why don't we have WiFi networks that work on a scale as large as Cellular networks?
- rocqua 8y ago
  Pure WiFi lacks the range. Moreover, there is very little on inter-working. The cellular networks standards, though truly horrible, have done an incredible job of allowing a connection to jump between base-stations, and to allow a user to connect to almost any base-station. WiMax was an attempt to do something like WiFi with higher range. But it lacked the whole inter-working back-end that would allow a user to seamlessly jump between base-points. Moreover, a network operator tends to have a lot more 'body' if only because it works on licensed spectrum. This means, at the very least, that if things go wrong you can sue it. Thus, there is at least a simple basis for trust. For WiFi access, since anyone can easily get on it, trust is much more a no go. Not just regarding malicious users, but also about simple reliability.
  - acct1771 8y ago
    An incredible job at enabling Feds (and any other amateur!) to use Stingrays/cell catchers
noway421 8y ago
This is amazing. I think it delivers on the promise of https://n-o-d-e.net/hyperboria.html https://n-o-d-e.net/hyperboria.html much more than Hyperboria+cjdns itself. Very excited, I expect there could be a compatibility layer with existing mesh networks which use cjdns.
_pmf_ 8y ago
Name reminds of https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksempf%C3%A4nger https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksempf%C3%A4nger Probably intentional.
- Y_Y 8y ago
  Me too. They could maybe recycle a few old slogans too: "Ein Volk, ein Reich, eine Netzverbindungmitteilungsgesellsschaft"
- sirlantis 8y ago
  That prefix certainly comes with baggage. There were a lot of affordable "Volks-" (read as: "for the people") products created by the DAF (German Labour Front) between 1933 and 1945. The more (internationally) known ones are the Volkswagen, Volksempfänger (radio receiver), Volkskühlschrank (refrigerator), Volksgasmaske (gas mask). On the other hand, the infamous "BILD" tabloid started using that prefix brand again in 2002, with the Volks-PC and has been marketing 200 products with that prefix since and other companies/projects/products followed (like Volks.Fahrrad - which had to rename because of the product proximity to Volkswagen).
womd 8y ago
pls someone invite me
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
womd 8y ago
pls someone invite me - i don't do social networks
- nighthawk24 8y ago
  https://volkfi.com/buy?code=6BqA19M https://volkfi.com/buy?code=6BqA19M
  - albruno 8y ago
    hi brother, I do not know anyone who has a volk fi but I really want to test this network and the cell phone, can you send me an invitation? allexbruno@protonmail.ch
grizzles 8y ago
That's cool. A few years back I ran an indiegogo campaign for a static mesh network. It encoded geohashes into ipv6 addresses and used physical location as a waypoint for next hop routing using Vincentys algorithm. Clever solutions were designed to handle local congestion and mobile devices. Ofc it went nowhere, but maybe Volk can steal those ideas... Another idea to borrow: The campaign also shipped with a global WIFI app. Eg. you put your WIFI password into the global database and could use the ones other people shared.
padraic7a 8y ago
What's with the name? Sounds very iffy to me. Posts like this on the subreddit don't help: https://www.reddit.com/r/VolkFi/comments/b0xpmn/volkfi_viral_stormtroopers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VolkFi/comments/b0xpmn/volkfi_viral...
- 24gttghh 8y ago
  Volk is German for 'People'. It's like the English 'Folk'. That reddit link sounds like just a single dude trying to expand the reach, who isn't affiliated with volkfi, but I would say he is trolling using the name like "stormtroopers"...
tsukurimashou 8y ago
Specs for those having issues with the website: Display: 6.2 inches, 1080 x 2280 pixels, 402ppi, Aspect Ratio: 19:9 Sensors: Fingerprint, Hall, Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Proximity, RGB Ambient Light Sensor, Electronic Compass, Sensor Hub Ports: USB C, Support USB Audio, nano-SIM slot Battery: 3700 mAh (non-removable) Audio: Bottom-facing speaker, 3-microphone with noise cancellation, Support AANC, Dirac HD Sound®, Dirac Power Sound® Vibration: OHaptic vibration motor Connectivity: Volk Fi, LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth Dimensions: 155.2 x 76.1 x 7.7 mm Weight: 179g Color: Midnight Black / Snow White, Anodized Aluminum & Glass Operating System: Android CPU: Snapdragon 845 (Octa-core, up to 2.5GHz) GPU: Adreno 630 RAM: 4GB LPDDR4X Storage: 64GB or 256GB UFS 2.1 2-LANE Camera: Dual 16 x 16 MP, Auto-HDR, 4K resolution video at 30fps, 1080P resolution video at 60fps, LED Flash, Aperture: f/1.7
Nokinside 8y ago
This type of networking will become more feasible with 5G because it has unlicensed spectrum and better support for radio convergence. 5G home routers might need just little configuration.
layoutIfNeeded 8y ago
I'm not sure I would be comfortable with running a base station in my pocket all the time.
Jemm 8y ago
I would love to see a version for amateur radio that uses amateur bands with more power. It would of course need to be un-encrypted but that is fine with me.
- 24gttghh 8y ago
  Ham radio already does this to a certain extent I believe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet
amai 8y ago
Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Smartphone!
linuxdude314 8y ago
I love the amount of unfettered optimism in this thread, but lets be clear this likely will amount to vaporware (at least the mesh part). Using an invite only system to bootstrap a distributed network that inherently relies on network effect makes absolutely no sense. Having an amateurish website that consumes so much resources it doesn't render faster than 5 FPS on an MBP should make you question the marketing prowess of this company. Straya Markovic, one of the lead engineers for FireChat is a co-founder. This is both a pro and a con. Like most engineer led companies they don't seem to understand the tremendous effort required to bootstrap this network and focus only on the technology aspects in their marketing.
pzo 8y ago
it reminded me of similar project open garden https://www.opengarden.com/ https://www.opengarden.com/
arthurcolle 8y ago
You should add a Bitcoin option for checkout/reservation.
snvzz 8y ago
This would work if the mesh was standardized and royalty-free, so that any company could make hardware for it. As long as it's a mesh network restricted to one company... no dice.
albruno 8y ago
Hi everyone, I really want to test this network but I have no invitation, can someone send me? allexbruno@protonmail.ch
njcomputermedic 8y ago
I wrote an article about Volk-fi for those of you looking for more information. https://1fixcomputermedic.com/volk-fi-promises-free-cell-phone-service-launch-date-december-2019/ https://1fixcomputermedic.com/volk-fi-promises-free-cell-pho...

298 points by 4d66ba06 8y ago

I'd happily put a large omnidirectional wifi antenna on my roof to help out with something like this.... if I could get a fair rate for the bandwidth used. My city has 70k people or so, and is perfectly flat. Similarly I'd be willing to help with any p2p type wireless, with a radio, antenna, and raspberry Pi or similar. Sadly most p2p wireless <-> internet gateways are proprietary.

anonymous5133 8y ago
I've always wondered about this as well. Get independent hobbyists to setup micro wifi networks. Run all traffic through a vpn or some sort so the operator doesn't risk their IP/ISP banning their service. Monetize the whole thing on a pay as you go service. $1/gb and give 70 cents of that to the independent operators. The big telecoms already have these little mini-wifi networks in bigger cities that you can get access to but only if you are a subscriber to their services. For me personally I would definitely pay the $1/gb to get access to such a network. Right now, I only use my cell data for e-mail and light web browsing. The cost of 3g/4g data is simply too expensive for me.
- sliken 8y ago
  I pay $0.05 per GB or so at home ($60 per TB). I'd happily sell my data at a small profit just to offset whatever the equipment is that's required. Someone else on this thread mentioned gotenna, which seemed like a similarly cool idea. Unfortunately they rejected the idea of allowing gotenna <-> internet <-> gotenna via a gateway I offered to write. They already have a unique id per device and I was going to use a DHT to allow all the gateways to track which user was behind which gateway. Seemed like a killer app to me, after all why limit who you message to being within 2-3 hops of you... why not allow the other few billion folks on the planet? Sadly they wouldn't allow access to the underlying mesh meta data and instead required using their extremely limited API. Having near free widgets that can mesh at low bandwidth (think SMS and IM like bandwidths) and then pay per GB for faster links seems like an excellent idea. I can imagine having phones/tablets without a $50 per month WAN charge if it could mesh and use wifi. Would be handy for sensor networks, home security, public safety monitoring (like cars going the wrong way on the highway), etc.
  - ricardobeat 8y ago
    LoRa might enable this, and easily reaches 10-20km range (up to 100km in theory). A lot of projects in Europe experimenting with it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
  - ixwt 8y ago
    This would be a great feature for gotenna. Especially if places near where you would be using a gotenna have internet access.
    - sliken 8y ago
      Well the gotenna network is pretty slow, and internet is not particularly friendly to store and forward with high latencies. I was thinking more along the lines of sharing your location (like APRS) and SMS/IM type traffic. That way you could have cover a large area with minimal infrastructure.
- klaushardt 8y ago
  In Germany there is exactly this for free. https://freifunk.net/en/ https://freifunk.net/en/ Altough its far away from good coverage you get free wifi here and there. Especially Coffee Shops and in Big Citys.
- samirm 8y ago
  There's things like https://www.nycmesh.net/ https://www.nycmesh.net/, https://tomesh.net/ https://tomesh.net/ and a bunch of others I can't find right now.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Tazmanian 8y ago
  Have been trying to do that for many years now first with the EFF scheme "openwireless.org", then with soprani.ca. https://wom.community/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/operatives https://wom.community/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/operatives. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/595zg5/sopranica-jmp-wom-cell-network-diy-anonymous https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/595zg5/sopranica-... Even have a good VPN supplier picked out. But these people are always talk and theory, never a simple blueprint for a standardized design. Guess it's always like this :( I'm not terribly impressed with the Tor organization either. The public really needs a way to bypass these lying thieving carriers and these gubmint bullshit artists wanting to keep their jobs. But without some sort of credible leadership - such alternatives will never exist.
woah 8y ago
Check out althea.org

josh2600 8y ago

I would bet almost any amount of money this isn’t going to work. In any mesh network, the overhead of coordinating nodes dominates network traffic. This is before you even begin to think about the terms of service violations for all of these WiFi access points.

angott 8y ago
And you haven't even mentioned the fact that mobile phones can move around, leading to high rates of dropped connections as devices come and go. There's no way this is going to work.
- remyM 8y ago
  Whoops, my phone connected to someone on a train that just went past! My phone call just dropped.
  - sliken 8y ago
    Think of it the opposite way. You have no coverage, are trying to get a message out and the nearest gateway is miles away. A moving car/train is close to you for plenty of time to transfer a few 100 bytes, and someone in the car/train has a mesh aware widget. It stores a copy and waits to go near a gateway where it upload it for you. Sure, it's not as nice as a WAN connection, but the average cellular contract is pretty expensive per month. Something like $10 per GB, and often a $30 and up base rate. So sure, long distance multi-hop mesh stinks for real time voice, but could be quite usable for other use cases.
    - mirashii 8y ago
      Ah, but now you're talking about solving an additional problem, delay tolerant networking, on top of mesh networking. This adds a whole new layer of complexity on top of the mesh network, and would probably only work as you say for a subset of services that are made to handle this type of unreliable network. Also many common delay tolerant network implementations rely on message replication to increase the probability of delivery of the message. This puts additional bandwidth strain on the inter-node hops of the network, which as some of the other commenters pointed out, not actually all that high.

doitLP 8y ago

I don’t get the invite model. Ask someone already invited to send you an invite? I guess it prevents spam reservations but I don’t have Facebook or twitter, so I guess I’m out of luck.

mdaniel 8y ago
I was also curious, and found https://volkfi.com/whyinvite https://volkfi.com/whyinvite which has a constructive sounding heading > Why is Volk Fi invite-only followed by blather blather about the technology and then finally some invite-sounding text of > But, because Volk Fi is crowdsourced, it needs a certain user density in order to have full coverage and reliability which seems to run directly in contradiction to why one would want the system to be invite-only. Can you imagine starting a BitTorrent service, and then trying to ensure the swarm stayed small by only telling your roommates? I guess that's why I'm not in marketing.
- TomMarius 8y ago
  Makes complete sense to me. The assumption probably is that people you invite are usually close to you.
- taneq 8y ago
  I'm guessing so they don't get people signing up where there are no other users anywhere nearby, and then posting bad reviews when their device never connects to any other devices.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  Speaking of Bittorrent... This is a YC '19 company and... https://igamerss.com/index.php/2019/03/19/here-are-the-85-st.. https://igamerss.com/index.php/2019/03/19/here-are-the-85-st.... "Volk Wi-fi: Volk is making an Android smartphone with a free information plan, no service required. The co-founders say they’re utilizing long-range wi-fi to share connections and construct a community of telephones. Co-Founder Greg Hazel was the Chief Architect at Bittorrent, whereas co-founder Straya Markovic was the lead engineer at mesh messaging platform Firechat." So yeah, they should know better.

nickodell 8y ago

>Volk One devices can connect to each other, from several miles away. Assuming that a voice call requires 8kbit/s of bandwidth, and assuming that you have about a watt of power, how feasible is it to connect through a phone that is a mile away? Serious question - I don't know how to do the math here.

slackfan 8y ago
Several miles? Sure, maybe, if conditions are good and you're line-of-sight. Good luck turning every phone into a cellphone tower. This seems like an overly optimistic scam.
amenghra 8y ago
If you want to learn how to do the math, this is old but a good starting point: http://www.ti.com/lit/ml/slap127/slap127.pdf http://www.ti.com/lit/ml/slap127/slap127.pdf (In general, radio engineering is taught at college-level and requires some basic math/physica if you are going with “rules of thumb” and fairly advanced math if you want to understand/derive exact equations).
int_19h 8y ago
One watt wouldn't be a problem at that distance, but any frequency this can operate on requires line-of-sight or close to it. "Several miles away" might be realistic in the middle of a desert, but in areas with hills or lots of large buildings? Not likely. Generally speaking, line-of-sight is almost always what limits point-to-point comm range for handhelds, rather than raw power. On higher frequencies, even vegetation can be a big deal.
ac29 8y ago
Trivial with the correct infrastructure - you can easily get 8kbps in 12.5kHz of bandwidth (a reasonably common channel size in the sub-GHz bands). Trick is, you ideally need line of site (in which case your effective range is effectively the horizon), and directional antennas for distances more than a relatively short distance (a few miles maybe). Some math follows. 30dBm is 1 W, and -100dBm is a low, but probably workable signal. We'll assume 0 antenna gain or loss to make the math easier. Free Space Path Loss (in dB): 20×log10(d) + 20×log10(f) + 92.45 d=distance in km, f=frequency in GHz So at 915MHz, we can get about 85km in free space @ 915MHz (this is actually past the horizon, so not really possible except from high elevations). 30dBm − (20×log10(85) + 20×log10(.915) +92.45) = -100dBm

TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago

How can internet connectivity be free? Doesn’t someone need to pay for a connection?

TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
To answer my own question, as per the FAQ: Volk Fi counts data usage and bytes shared via WiFi. Every user gets the amount they share, unlimited. If a Volk user consumes more data than they share in a month, there is a 5GB data cap. After that, the user can pay the super cheap price of $1/GB for additional data.
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
  I would love for this to be just an app on a standard Android device.
  - xiphias2 8y ago
    I would gladly pay with Bitcoin on the Lightning network to get internet access, but the market is not ready yet.
  - amorphic 8y ago
    Apparently because their special phones have "new, long-range radio hardware" that makes this all possible. But radio technologies are pretty widely understood and while I'm no expert I've not heard of anything that could achieve what they're suggesting. So I'll remain skeptical until I understand better what that "long-range radio hardware" is and how it makes such a mesh network feasible.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Ah, yet another carrier offering Unlimited* data.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  So as someone who starts out with a YC '19 * Volk Fi phone, your sharing will be at 0, and therefore immediately subject to a 5GB data cap with $1/gb afterward. Uh huh. In the old days, we called this a "Multilevel Marketing scam". (And the best part is that I would pay for my own internet line, AND pay for my phone use use my internet line.) * https://igamerss.com/index.php/2019/03/19/here-are-the-85-startups-that-launched-at-ycs-w19-demo-day-1-techcrunch/ https://igamerss.com/index.php/2019/03/19/here-are-the-85-st... "Volk Wi-fi: Volk is making an Android smartphone with a free information plan, no service required. The co-founders say they’re utilizing long-range wi-fi to share connections and construct a community of telephones. Co-Founder Greg Hazel was the Chief Architect at Bittorrent, whereas co-founder Straya Markovic was the lead engineer at mesh messaging platform Firechat."

slackfan 8y ago

These data collection scams are getting more and more elaborate.

CKN23-ARIN 8y ago

(YC '19)

amenghra 8y ago

Sounds a bit like Fon from the 2005s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fon_(company) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fon_(company)

int_19h 8y ago

This makes a bit more sense: "Every Volk phone has a SIM card slot and supports use on traditional LTE networks. However, a SIM is not necessary and the phone will always prioritize the Volk network first. The Volk network works as such: every Volk user gets a special router with their phone. The router acts as a wireless Qi charging pad also. The router connects to your existing internet via Ethernet or something similar. The router is what connects phones to Volk and allows calls, texts, and data to go through. If a router isn't nearby, the phone will try to find another Volk phone to use as a hop, until it finally reaches a router. All Volk phones have strong radios and can go more than half a mile if terrain is clear. If there are no routers or Volk phones nearby to hop to, you'll either not have service, have to use Wifi, or fallback to LTE if you have a SIM card installed and it has active service." (https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/aq3hul/volk_fi_claims_it_gets_reception_everyone_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/aq3hul/volk_fi_claim...) So the backbone of the mesh network is their charging stations / routers, and phones can (?) mesh but not necessarily that far. What I still don't like about this is that nowhere they talk about the frequencies on which they operate, not even in the "Specs" section of the website. This makes it very hard to verify any range claims they make.

sinak 8y ago
The frequencies are what I was curious about as well. To have a half mile range at relatively low powers it would need to be a low frequency band. I'm guessing they haven't bought licenses from the FCC, so my bet is that they're using the 900 MHz ISM band. There's only 26 MHz of spectrum in that band, which isn't much, particularly for a mesh setup that won't be particularly spectrally efficient. Even with a high 30 dB signal to noise ratio, the Shannon channel capacity in a 26 MHz band is 50 Mbps. MIMO helps a bit, but even in ideal real-world conditions you'll likely have at most 50 Mbps to share between all the users connected to a node. Spread that across a few users/mesh hops, throw in some packet retransmissions and noise, and it's not nearly enough to compete with LTE networks at any meaningful user density. Incentivizing users to create as many nodes as possible is a good idea, as that allows lower power transmissions and better frequency reuse. It's still a huge struggle to get anywhere near commercial wireless speeds, particularly in areas where there are fewer nodes and a higher density of users.

teamspirit 8y ago

When I first heard about Project Fi, this is what I imagined it to be like. I was a little disappointed when I found out it was just glorified wifi-calling.

jewel 8y ago

This sounds great. One idea I had to stop abuse was to force traffic from a phone to route out to the public Internet through its own base station. That would require a lot of hops, in some cases, but the traffic could short circuit through others' base stations back to their own through the Internet, without originating the traffic from the intermediaries. I wrote up more about this here: https://stevenjewel.com/2014/01/android-mesh/ https://stevenjewel.com/2014/01/android-mesh/ In this particular case they could originate the traffic from Volk servers instead. Also, people here may be interested in GoTenna, a portable mesh network hotspot that has been out for a few years, at roughly $75 each.

chpmrc 8y ago

Very interesting. This website is completely unusable on Chrome 72 (MacBook Pro 15" Mid-2015) but is smooth as butter on Safari.

yoz 8y ago
Weird, it seems to be totally smooth for me on Chrome 72 (MacBook Pro 13" 2017).
Matthias247 8y ago
It's absolutely unusable for me on Safari. Scrolling is less than 1fps. Haven't tried another browser.
- ksec 8y ago
  Same here. It was literally killing my CPU.

woah 8y ago

This will have Gotenna like speeds, that is it will take several seconds to send a small text message. That’s in an optimistic scenario where the recipient is within a mile or two of you. In a mesh scenario, the speed is going to go way down. In an area urban enough that there are other VolkFi owners to mesh through, there is almost always going to be cell service. It’s just a gimmick to let them sell some slightly modified Android phones. My guess is that they will almost always be connected through the cellular network. If the user would then like to imagine that they are connected to some kind of physics-defying mesh network, I suppose that’s nice. They could probably save on production costs by omitting the 900mhz chip with almost no effect on the service.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
The claim is that they'll always prioritize Volk over LTE. Which is an interesting promise, because if you're correct, they'd potentially be prioritizing the slower connection.

sequoia 8y ago

Website just about crashed my browser. I hope I can find out what it's about here.

weddpros 8y ago
confirmed... worst website experience this far in 2019! and I tried both Chrome and Safari! Seriously Volk Fi: fix this asap (like before you continue working on your business)

Aloha 8y ago

This is a product I might buy - if I could actually buy it.

kwhitefoot 8y ago

The hard part will be getting enough such mobiles out in the market for the mesh to ever work and getting the price down low enough for people who are not ever so interested to buy it. Presumably this is using something like Wimax so it shouldn't be difficult for other players to introduce compatible devices. In fact it should be possible to make a Wimax version of the portable Mifi routers that connect to mobile networks then you could use your existing devices and some kind of VOIP solution.

viraptor 8y ago

I like the idea, but I'm not sure how the abuse will work on those networks. There are two possible cases: 1. Volk data goes out via their gateway (proxied): They get access to your data. Their IPs get CloudFlare captchas all the time. (Like tor) 2. Volk data goes out from your router: You get to explain the CP access from your network. Your home IP gets CloudFlare captchas all the time. You get to monitor random people's traffic. Which option is it?

dpwm 8y ago
> Which option is it? "no more censorship" doesn't seem like a claim that can exist with option 2 – because they're crowd-sourcing carriers, and carriers censor. So if their marketing is consistent – and ruling out a large-scale reorganization of the internet to be more decentralized – then it's option 1. Option 1 also means that carriers can kill internet connectivity relatively trivially to these devices. Countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar and China will do this if it becomes a big enough threat to their internet censorship endeavors.
buildbuildbuild 8y ago
Our approach at NYC Mesh is to give each donor of home internet a router which VPNs all mesh traffic through our ASN. This boosts privacy and neutrality for our mesh users, and protects transit donors from their ISP's interpretation of the traffic.
gruez 8y ago
>Their IPs get CloudFlare captchas all the time. (Like tor) This doesn’t seem to be a that much of a problem with commercial VPN providers. Maybe the good actors outnumber the bad actors?

boulevard 8y ago

There will be serious security concerns with this, opening so many possibilities for Man in the Middle attack.

gruez 8y ago
Just encrypt everything in transit ?

tomglynch 8y ago

I'm concerned that providing a bounce for someone else's call will use large amount of battery. This means, trying to conserve battery won't be possible if people keep using your phone to bounce off.

max_ 8y ago

This is slightly off-topic, but why don't we have WiFi networks that work on a scale as large as Cellular networks?

rocqua 8y ago
Pure WiFi lacks the range. Moreover, there is very little on inter-working. The cellular networks standards, though truly horrible, have done an incredible job of allowing a connection to jump between base-stations, and to allow a user to connect to almost any base-station. WiMax was an attempt to do something like WiFi with higher range. But it lacked the whole inter-working back-end that would allow a user to seamlessly jump between base-points. Moreover, a network operator tends to have a lot more 'body' if only because it works on licensed spectrum. This means, at the very least, that if things go wrong you can sue it. Thus, there is at least a simple basis for trust. For WiFi access, since anyone can easily get on it, trust is much more a no go. Not just regarding malicious users, but also about simple reliability.
- acct1771 8y ago
  An incredible job at enabling Feds (and any other amateur!) to use Stingrays/cell catchers

noway421 8y ago

This is amazing. I think it delivers on the promise of https://n-o-d-e.net/hyperboria.html https://n-o-d-e.net/hyperboria.html much more than Hyperboria+cjdns itself. Very excited, I expect there could be a compatibility layer with existing mesh networks which use cjdns.

_pmf_ 8y ago

Name reminds of https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksempf%C3%A4nger https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksempf%C3%A4nger Probably intentional.

Y_Y 8y ago
Me too. They could maybe recycle a few old slogans too: "Ein Volk, ein Reich, eine Netzverbindungmitteilungsgesellsschaft"
sirlantis 8y ago
That prefix certainly comes with baggage. There were a lot of affordable "Volks-" (read as: "for the people") products created by the DAF (German Labour Front) between 1933 and 1945. The more (internationally) known ones are the Volkswagen, Volksempfänger (radio receiver), Volkskühlschrank (refrigerator), Volksgasmaske (gas mask). On the other hand, the infamous "BILD" tabloid started using that prefix brand again in 2002, with the Volks-PC and has been marketing 200 products with that prefix since and other companies/projects/products followed (like Volks.Fahrrad - which had to rename because of the product proximity to Volkswagen).

womd 8y ago

pls someone invite me

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

womd 8y ago

pls someone invite me - i don't do social networks

nighthawk24 8y ago
https://volkfi.com/buy?code=6BqA19M https://volkfi.com/buy?code=6BqA19M
- albruno 8y ago
  hi brother, I do not know anyone who has a volk fi but I really want to test this network and the cell phone, can you send me an invitation? allexbruno@protonmail.ch

grizzles 8y ago

That's cool. A few years back I ran an indiegogo campaign for a static mesh network. It encoded geohashes into ipv6 addresses and used physical location as a waypoint for next hop routing using Vincentys algorithm. Clever solutions were designed to handle local congestion and mobile devices. Ofc it went nowhere, but maybe Volk can steal those ideas... Another idea to borrow: The campaign also shipped with a global WIFI app. Eg. you put your WIFI password into the global database and could use the ones other people shared.

padraic7a 8y ago

What's with the name? Sounds very iffy to me. Posts like this on the subreddit don't help: https://www.reddit.com/r/VolkFi/comments/b0xpmn/volkfi_viral_stormtroopers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VolkFi/comments/b0xpmn/volkfi_viral...

24gttghh 8y ago
Volk is German for 'People'. It's like the English 'Folk'. That reddit link sounds like just a single dude trying to expand the reach, who isn't affiliated with volkfi, but I would say he is trolling using the name like "stormtroopers"...

tsukurimashou 8y ago

Specs for those having issues with the website: Display: 6.2 inches, 1080 x 2280 pixels, 402ppi, Aspect Ratio: 19:9 Sensors: Fingerprint, Hall, Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Proximity, RGB Ambient Light Sensor, Electronic Compass, Sensor Hub Ports: USB C, Support USB Audio, nano-SIM slot Battery: 3700 mAh (non-removable) Audio: Bottom-facing speaker, 3-microphone with noise cancellation, Support AANC, Dirac HD Sound®, Dirac Power Sound® Vibration: OHaptic vibration motor Connectivity: Volk Fi, LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth Dimensions: 155.2 x 76.1 x 7.7 mm Weight: 179g Color: Midnight Black / Snow White, Anodized Aluminum & Glass Operating System: Android CPU: Snapdragon 845 (Octa-core, up to 2.5GHz) GPU: Adreno 630 RAM: 4GB LPDDR4X Storage: 64GB or 256GB UFS 2.1 2-LANE Camera: Dual 16 x 16 MP, Auto-HDR, 4K resolution video at 30fps, 1080P resolution video at 60fps, LED Flash, Aperture: f/1.7

Nokinside 8y ago

This type of networking will become more feasible with 5G because it has unlicensed spectrum and better support for radio convergence. 5G home routers might need just little configuration.

layoutIfNeeded 8y ago

I'm not sure I would be comfortable with running a base station in my pocket all the time.

Jemm 8y ago

I would love to see a version for amateur radio that uses amateur bands with more power. It would of course need to be un-encrypted but that is fine with me.

24gttghh 8y ago
Ham radio already does this to a certain extent I believe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet

amai 8y ago

Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Smartphone!

linuxdude314 8y ago

I love the amount of unfettered optimism in this thread, but lets be clear this likely will amount to vaporware (at least the mesh part). Using an invite only system to bootstrap a distributed network that inherently relies on network effect makes absolutely no sense. Having an amateurish website that consumes so much resources it doesn't render faster than 5 FPS on an MBP should make you question the marketing prowess of this company. Straya Markovic, one of the lead engineers for FireChat is a co-founder. This is both a pro and a con. Like most engineer led companies they don't seem to understand the tremendous effort required to bootstrap this network and focus only on the technology aspects in their marketing.

pzo 8y ago

it reminded me of similar project open garden https://www.opengarden.com/ https://www.opengarden.com/

arthurcolle 8y ago

You should add a Bitcoin option for checkout/reservation.

snvzz 8y ago

This would work if the mesh was standardized and royalty-free, so that any company could make hardware for it. As long as it's a mesh network restricted to one company... no dice.

albruno 8y ago

Hi everyone, I really want to test this network but I have no invitation, can someone send me? allexbruno@protonmail.ch

njcomputermedic 8y ago

I wrote an article about Volk-fi for those of you looking for more information. https://1fixcomputermedic.com/volk-fi-promises-free-cell-phone-service-launch-date-december-2019/ https://1fixcomputermedic.com/volk-fi-promises-free-cell-pho...