With this scheme, Harold, how would 'travelling' through town work - how would "hand-offs" between access points (the POTS lines) into the PSTN work? (Cell spacing is now down below 2 mules - 3.2 km in many places.) Eventually, I think, the network infrastructure will evolve into a series of intelligent 'nodes' located at much smaller distances to each other than today's CO (central office) switches that currently provide local wireline (POTS lines) cutomers with their 'service'. These 'nodes' will intelligently select the shortest path route - accessing greater distance 'paths' for cross-country calls as necessary ... integrate into this 'wireless' comms access terminals/base stations (RF transceiving apparatus) and you have an instance of what you now propose! RF Jim (and former Cellular Eng) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Harold M Hallikainen" To: Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2002 11:51 AM Subject: Re: [EE]: p2p Cell Phones ---> Now: " 2.4 GHz packet 'Node Phones' " > Somewhat related is the idea of sharing bandwidth on POTS lines (similar > to sharing DSL bandwidth through wifi). Users would have a cordless phone > base station that would allow others to use their line (for outgoing > calls) with appropriate toll restrictions. Anyone wanting to make a call > would pick up their handset, which would search for a not busy base > station. This would put the vastly underused infrastructure (POTS pairs > going to each home) to more use by people visiting the neighborhood or by > several people in one household making simultaneous calls by using > neighbors lines. Long distance calls could be handled by dial-around to > have a user select the carrier. People would be encouraged to continue to > have POTS lines since that's the only way they could receive calls (they > could make calls using shared lines in the neighborhood). > > Harold > > > > FCC Rules Online at http://hallikainen.com/FccRules > Lighting control for theatre and television at http://www.dovesystems.com > > Reach broadcasters, engineers, manufacturers, compliance labs, and > attorneys. > Advertise at http://www.hallikainen.com/FccRules/ . > > -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.