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In the old alphanumeric pager networks you could receive a notification without having to transmit anything. This meant that your location remained private --
by octoberfranklin 5y ago
In the old alphanumeric pager networks you could receive a notification without having to transmit anything.
This meant that your location remained private -- even from triangulation attacks! Not even satellite pagers have this feature; they all require that you transmit first (often with a GPS coordinate included).
With the collapse of the POCSAG networks (at least in the US -- the vast majority are now off the air), we have lost something valuable.
Wide area broadcasting might not be as bandwidth-efficient as cellular schemes, but if you just want to receive a kilobit-sized notification (which might be of the form "you have a message from XYZ", prompting you to go online) that isn't a big deal.
We could go from always-on surveillance to letting people decide on a per-notification basis if declaring their location is worth receiving the rest of the message. Or if they should move to a different location before doing so.
- jcims 5y agoWell, to be fair, POCSAG is plaintext and scoopable with a $20 USB radio and some software. But your point stands.
- octoberfranklin 5y agoNothing stopped you from encrypting messages before sending them. This isn't ham radio. Besides, you should not rely on physical infrastructure providers for encryption. TLS is done by the endpoints, not the ISPs, for a very good reason.
- walterbell 5y ago> We could go from always-on surveillance to letting people decide on a per-notification basis if declaring their location is worth receiving the rest of the message. Or if they should move to a different location before doing so. Could a similar capability be built on a local LoRA mesh?
- octoberfranklin 5y agoLoRA will always have spotty coverage. There might be a lot of spots all over the place, but they're still just little spots. For short messages, you need much lower frequency. Then you can cover entire cities from one or two sites. The lowest-frequency LoRA transmitters are still UHF, and they can't be used from towers or hilltops due to HAAT restrictions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_above_average_terrain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_above_average_terrain You really want something VHF or below. Like a chunk of the former analog TV bands. A really really tiny sliver is enough. LoRA is a horrifically bandwidth-inefficient protocol. It craps on a gigantic swath of frequencies in order to send a few bits of data. They call it a "chirp", not a "crap". The only reason anybody gets away with such a wasteful modulation scheme is that it happens in the garbage band.
- walterbell 5y agoWhat do you think of https://github.com/lulzlabs/AirChat https://github.com/lulzlabs/AirChat?
- upofadown 5y agoI kept a pager for as long as was possible. It is really the service I want. I had this tiny object that ran off a single AAA cell for something like a month that would tell me if there was something I had to deal with. The available technology has degraded significantly since then. You would think that pager service would be significantly cheaper to provide than something like 4/5G...
- dogleash 5y ago>You would think that pager service would be significantly cheaper to provide than something like 4/5G... In almost every way, except the forcing function of using an expensive resource (radio spectrum) less efficiently.
- upofadown 5y agoEntire towns can run off one narrow band FM channel. Paging is efficient simply because of the low bandwidth.