Personal Cell networks.

I’ve been thinking about the entry I made earlier in the week…

http://nokian95.groups.vox.com

Why wouldn’t it be possible to set up a ‘localised cell network’ using the phones themselves as base stations, repeaters, etc?

For example:
At work we all tote phones around.
All have Bluetooth, and within the next couple of years, all will have Wifi.
We could potentially activate a piece of software…
Which activates a local Wifi based network linking the phones…
We all log onto this network...
And this allows us to talk to each other.
An SMS has to bounce through the Cell net, even if I’m sitting three meters away from the person I want to message.

Why couldn't my phone, recognise their phone if it is within range, and bypass the Cell net completely?

The same system could work for kids at schools, building lots of mini networks during lunch breaks.
Imagine games of schoolyard tag, where all the participants have software (hooked into GPS and the other phones) that mimics the ‘Alien 2’ style scanners which beep with greater intensity as the person who is ‘it’ gets closer.
A thousand kids, all linked by Net and tracked by GPS could map out the boundaries of the school grounds and classes in half an hour. Software could construct a real life Doom style game. The horror creatures only appearing on the screens of the children’s phones, mapped with the phones cameras over real life locations. This location data would be passed onto younger brothers and sisters when they start school. The more kids travel these locations, the denser the data becomes.
Kid’s could ‘tag’ locations with schoolyard lore.

Emergency workers could establish a mini network at a crash site, just by turning on their phones. Hell, the crash survivors might have already established a local net, just to find each other.

Imagine the bandwidth potential of a Soccer match. Each phone could link up, with a low range radio standard such as Wibree, register its position in the stadium with GPS, and graphic data could be pumped through the network, producing an enormous TV screen.
Instead of waving candles at rock concerts, everyone waves their phones and the huge composite picture would shimmer and flow.

I wonder if it’s possible to logon on all the phone cameras? Record a thousand different angles, a thousand different personal experiences of the one event.

One super antenna isn’t needed to suck up each phone individually.
Just small ones around the edge of the arena, sipping data from the huge net linked people filled cup of shared experience.

What would be the difficulties in getting the phones to recognise each other, with one of these radio standards?

Nokia is already fooling around with P2P networks running on phones.
The network would log phones on and off as units come into, and fall out of range.
The more dense the population of phone units become, the greater the data transmission.
Laptops could be used to boost range.
Along with the list of personal contact details my phone would carry, there would be a list of ‘localised cell nets’ that my phone had permission to log onto.

for example:
At school the phone would log onto my friends in the class room.
Travelling home the phone would log onto the Cell network.
Once home the phone would log onto my families phone network, and all re-establish the ‘friends from school’ network if one of my mates came over to study.

We’ve been playing around with Bluetooth at work, and these concepts seem to be possible.
Our PC Bluetooth adaptors came packaged with the facility to build a wireless net between units.
All that is needed is for the phones to recognise this localised Network and each other.