Great and good friend of sportsfirings.com and valued commenter lelnet left a long comment on last night’s cellphone post. Because his comment represents a lot of work and thought (and I believe in rewarding hard work) and because I’m afraid it will get lost in the shuffle, I’m promoting it to a blog post (with his permission).
You can already buy, off the shelf at Fry’s, a “phone” that does essentially what you’re talking about, using available wi-fi networks to connect with Skype and make calls through that, without any involvement of the cell providers. (Yes, I know…Skype is a proprietary protocol and would be unacceptable to Stallman. The firmware is also closed. But since it’s provably _possible_, one could do it with open standards if one saw a market.)
The problem is that it doesn’t scale well. Getting a reliable wi-fi signal is pretty easy…in the sorts of places one is likely to have access to a _wired_ phone whenever one wants one. Building a wi-fi network that covers the places one actually needs mobile connectivity from is a massively harder problem, due to the range limitations of unlicensed spectrum.
It _might_ be possible to do it using amateur frequencies, _if_ you could get regulatory approval to open those up to use by the general public. Which, of course, would involve fighting off both the whole telco industry and at least 80% of the amateur radio community. Considering that the latter group is where you’d be trying to recruit most of your network engineers from, it seems like it’d be a bad idea to begin your plan by irrevocably pissing them off, even if you magically assume that you’ll be able to out-muscle the telcos in Washington.
The last mile is a hard problem on several different dimensions, some of them physical and some of them political. But there is something you _could_ do…
Build an Android (or, if you like, Replicant) phone, pre-configured to send all its traffic through an encrypted VPN to an anonymizing end-point. Purchase connectivity for it on an existing cell carrier’s prepaid plan. Disable the cellular voice service, and have it send and receive calls exclusively through VoIP connectivity to an Asterisk or FreeSwitch server, either run by the same entity that does your anonymizer, or run yourself on a cheap colo server stuck in a rack in some country you doubt is ever going to care enough to spy on you.
Your cell provider can easily determine that Charles Udall Farley (or whatever name you gave them when you signed up…it’s prepaid, so it’s not like the name you give has to pass a credit check) pushes a lot of data around, but they’d have no way of inspecting the content. They’d have a record of Mr. Farley’s movements around their network, but no way to associate that with you, or even with the phone number you make and receive calls on. An Open Source OS on the phone addresses the “remote bugging” fears. It doesn’t depend on you personally running any software that RMS would find objectionable. And since you can make and receive calls from anywhere that you’re able to get a data signal off a cell tower, it’s still useful if your car breaks down by the side of the road, instead of just in your home and office, like a wi-fi-only device would be.
(I came up with this plan for a team of spies in a novel my wife is writing. But although to my knowledge no such phone exists today, there’s absolutely no barrier to someone building one tomorrow. And both the technologies and the services required to support the back-end of it are already available for purchase in the real world right now, at prices comparable to or better than what people who already had cell phones in the mid-90s were paying for service then.)
The only thing I’d add to this is that I, personally, have no interest in pissing off the amateur radio operators out there; both because it is not good strategy, as lelnet notes, and because I happen to be one myself. (KF5BFL, in case anyone was wondering, but don’t look for me; I don’t have any transmitting equipment at the moment.)