Ask HN: Why is communication among physically nearby devices still impractical?

23 points by mmrasheed 11 years ago | 10 comments

Why is peer to peer ad hoc communication among physically nearby commercially available end user devices still impractical in the 21st century? Why 5+ smart devices sitting on my desk and 20+ smart devices around my house can't communicate, sync or exchange information without going through servers thousands of miles away? What stops companies implementing simple both way fm radio, or ad hoc wlan communication, or mesh of all the smart devices? Even, IoT which once came with the promise to remove this digital divide is now forming on infrastructure centered model. Smart devices now a days mean always-connected-to-the-infrastructure devices. What is the reason behind the huge gap between physically nearby and digitally nearby for today's smart devices?

Possible reasons that come to my mind are-

. Technically not feasible.

. Significantly less value from business perspective.

. Government(s) discourage companies to improve significantly in peer to peer ad hoc technology for security reasons.

Any idea? What's going on?

icefox 11 years ago |

Bonjour on the mac was really cool when everyone was implementing it. I could goto a conference and open iChat and instantly be able to chat with anyone else in the room. I could browse photos taken by my wife at home that were on her computer. I had a little mp3 "radio" that would play music from local users that had itunes (or itunes like) running. My router would just appear in my browsers list of local devices. Interacting at home was nice and handy, but interacting out in public was where it just magically "worked".

I am going to say that the cloud killed this. If companies can get you to interact with your friends and family in your own house through their cloud service than they get a lock in strategy which is a bit of an incentive to kill their local stuff. It also doesn't help that the major device that you would like to have talking is your cell phone which has a major company behind it pushing their cloud for all it is worth.

fragmede 11 years ago |

It's there, if you look. AirDrop between Apple devices, for example, seems to do just fine.

DLNA orchestrates media between disparate (non-Apple) devices as another example. My desktop downloads a video, my NAS shares it, I press play on my Android phone, and the video is output on the TV.

So my various devices can talk to each other, but it took Sony and Intel an untold amount of resources to achieve. For something as simple as copy and paste of text, there's no such body dedicated to making that work.

killerpopiller 11 years ago | |

AirDrop is broken with my devices: imac, iphone, mb air, nothing older than 2 years. might be the FW though, but after disabling the rules they still don't find each other allways.

RantyDave 11 years ago | | |

Have you tried recently? It works every time for me now.

oppositelock 11 years ago |

Interoperability is a lot of work, and requires agreements on interchange formats, which is even more time consuming, and it won't sell more devices, and once you have this, you now have to worry about security.

Technically, it's certainly feasible and you do have specialized deployments where devices use mesh networking.

Governments don't really limit peer to peer tech.

There's simply better return for R&D dollars developing other features.

codeonfire 11 years ago |

Mobile device makers don't want it. In their mind each person has one device. A person with five devices is not their target market. Users don't want it. They probably have one device and don't want to worry that someone else is thumbing through their pictures. There is also no compensation system for expending energy to carry ad-hoc traffic. If I have a bottle of water in the middle of the desert I am going to charge a large amount for it. If I have a mobile device far from a city I want to charge a lot to transfer ad-hoc traffic. There is hardly any use case where users want to communicate with random nearby people, so the ad-hoc traffic will usually be through traffic.

jefflinwood 11 years ago |

I built a peer-to-peer ad-hoc iOS app based on multipeer connectivity called MapRhino that's meant for use in the car on road trips - that and airplanes are basically the only places left with no reliable wifi/network connections that people gather.

Maybe there are a few other use cases, like large outdoor music festivals with overloaded connections, but there just isn't a real use case for most of these services.

Come up with a compelling use case for peer-to-peer/mesh technology, and I think you'll see widespread adoption.

zeeed 11 years ago |

there's security and then there's maintainability and scalability. it's much easier to maintain and fix a centralized (cloud-based) tech than it is to release a stable bluetooth stack. and when it's centralized, there's a business case.

j_s 11 years ago |

The recent discussion of the Google Tone Chrome extension¹ proved that technical infeasibility is not the issue.

¹https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9575291

motti 11 years ago |

There's a lot of work and movement on http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Direct