Shiny and I had a conversation fairly recently about how network peering works on the internet. That's basically how agreements work with major telcos sharing their backbones between one another. I was arguing about how the same type of peering agreements should work with cellular so the whole concept of 'roaming' no longer exists.

At any rate, strangely enough Ars Technica now has an article about how peering on the internet works. Linky to follow. It's a little different than my understanding was, actually. And most of you guys probably won't care.

http://arstechnica.com/guides/other/pee ... nsit.ars/1

Uh, fuck GSM roaming and let it jump from pebble to pebble... from California to South Africa, eh? Good luck with that man.

well, there's really no difference between the internet and the cellular network. In the internet, you connect to an ISP which peers into the internet backbone... it traverses and goes to the receiver's ISP. With cellular it goes to a cellular tower... then to the backbone.. then to another cell tower. What's the difference? I don't think the end user should have to deal with the backbone structure and how companies charge each other. There should be a single flat fee for connectivity regardless of where you are. Let the carriers come up with peering or metering or whatever and handle it amongst themselves.

Well, I probably don't understand the principles (not the first nor the last thing I would not know about networking) - shame to admit, but I never had a (useful) course on all that and I concentrate on other stuff - so no time to sit down and study the matter on my own. If the proposal is to make a network by using connections that two cellphones can make with each other (so that your message pass through x (x > 0) other's cellphones before it reach Shiny) then "good luck" is the passing answer.

hehe...nah, nothing like that. I wouldn't want my call bouncing through someone else's cell phone. Basically all that happens is your call bounces to the nearest tower, then it gets turned into bits and put onto a cable. It travels across the provider's wired network to the nearest cell tower to the person you're talking to, then gets converted to radio waves again. This cable is even running TCP/IP, just like the internet... and I'm fairly certain it runs on the public internet at some point (in some cases, at least).

Then it is just like I thought it is (in the reality, not in the first post). Now, why would that be for free? I mean, catching your impulse costs, transferring it costs, re-emitting it costs, building and maintaining the infrastructure costs, and *whateverelsethathastodosomethingwithit* costs.

I think satis finds the roaming costs to be ridiculous. Sure everyone wants a cut, but the margins they put on roaming costs is by large ridiculous.

yea, basically. I don't think there should be such a thing as roaming. Charge a flat fee (maybe tack on an extra $5 for 'unlimited roaming') and then just let the carriers work it out. On the internet you don't have to worry about whose network you cross getting to Google. From a technical standpoint, this is exactly the same thing, but they charge you.