
Volk Fi: Distributed network smartphone - 4d66ba06
https://volkfi.com/
======
int_19h
This makes a bit more sense:

"Every Volk phone has a SIM card slot and supports use on traditional LTE
networks.

However, a SIM is not necessary and the phone will always prioritize the Volk
network first.

The Volk network works as such: every Volk user gets a special router with
their phone. The router acts as a wireless Qi charging pad also. The router
connects to your existing internet via Ethernet or something similar.

The router is what connects phones to Volk and allows calls, texts, and data
to go through.

If a router isn't nearby, the phone will try to find another Volk phone to use
as a hop, until it finally reaches a router.

All Volk phones have strong radios and can go more than half a mile if terrain
is clear.

If there are no routers or Volk phones nearby to hop to, you'll either not
have service, have to use Wifi, or fallback to LTE if you have a SIM card
installed and it has active service."

([https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/aq3hul/volk_fi_claim...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/aq3hul/volk_fi_claims_it_gets_reception_everyone_and/))

So the backbone of the mesh network is their charging stations / routers, and
phones can (?) mesh but not necessarily that far.

What I still don't like about this is that nowhere they talk about the
frequencies on which they operate, not even in the "Specs" section of the
website. This makes it very hard to verify any range claims they make.

~~~
sinak
The frequencies are what I was curious about as well. To have a half mile
range at relatively low powers it would need to be a low frequency band.

I'm guessing they haven't bought licenses from the FCC, so my bet is that
they're using the 900 MHz ISM band.

There's only 26 MHz of spectrum in that band, which isn't much, particularly
for a mesh setup that won't be particularly spectrally efficient.

Even with a high 30 dB signal to noise ratio, the Shannon channel capacity in
a 26 MHz band is 50 Mbps. MIMO helps a bit, but even in ideal real-world
conditions you'll likely have at most 50 Mbps to share between all the users
connected to a node. Spread that across a few users/mesh hops, throw in some
packet retransmissions and noise, and it's not nearly enough to compete with
LTE networks at any meaningful user density.

Incentivizing users to create as many nodes as possible is a good idea, as
that allows lower power transmissions and better frequency reuse. It's still a
huge struggle to get anywhere near commercial wireless speeds, particularly in
areas where there are fewer nodes and a higher density of users.

~~~
ac29
I work with 900MHz radios and infrastructure, here's my thoughts:

> The frequencies are what I'm confused by as well. To have a half mile range
> at relatively low powers it would need to be a low frequency band.

> I'm guessing they haven't bought licenses from the FCC, so my bet is that
> they're using the 900 MHz ISM band.

Seems likely, and probably even works in controlled tests over relatively
short distances. 900MHz meshing radios certainly exist, like this one (no
affiliation with them, haven't used the product):
[https://www.rajant.com/products/breadcrumb-wireless-
nodes/lx...](https://www.rajant.com/products/breadcrumb-wireless-nodes/lx-
series/)

>Even with a high 30 dB signal to noise ratio, the Shannon channel capacity in
a 26 MHz band is 50 Mbps.

Impossible in urban areas without highly directional antennas (which aren't
small). The effective noise floor in most even semi-developed areas I've
worked in is ~-100 to -80dBm - it can be a struggle even with expensive radios
and fixed infrastructure. 30dB SNR just isn't going to happen over any
appreciable amount of range on this sort of device (a high gain parabolic
dish? sure). Using all 26MHz of the spectrum with an omni directional antenna
(again, as would be required) also isn't going to happen except over
relatively short distances.

900MHz is good technology, and can get robust, long distance links with the
right infrastructure (I most work on 1-10mi links). The limitations on a
pocket sized device with a pocket sized antenna mean this is unlikely to work
@ 900MHz- especially in their fantasized scenarios of being in areas with no
cell phone coverage (cell carriers have access to better bands, and far better
infrastructure).

~~~
athrowaway3z
> cell carriers have access to better bands, and far better infrastructure

What would be the best band for this kind of infrastructure? ( Disregarding
any existing FCC licenses )

~~~
ansible
> _What would be the best band for this kind of infrastructure? ( Disregarding
> any existing FCC licenses )_

The frequency bands that have been licensed for cellular infrastructure.

Its all a trade-off. Higher frequencies get you better data bandwidth, but
require more power and get attenuated more by stuff (buildings, trees). Lower
frequencies get you much better range for a given power level and better
building penetration, but lower data bandwidth.

Exceptions to this are the "crap" bands, like 2.4GHz and 60GHz. Microwave
ovens (which are great interferers, BTW) use 2.4GHz because it is absorbed by
water. Great for heating your food. No so great trying to transmit data in an
outdoor environment with rain and fog.

60GHz gets absorbed by the oxygen in the atmosphere, so that's another band
that's only good for very short ranges.

The bands the cellular carriers have now are a good trade-off between power
requirements, data bandwidth, and other issues (like absorption). The ISM
bands exist basically because nobody would pay to use them.

------
woah
This will have Gotenna like speeds, that is it will take several seconds to
send a small text message. That’s in an optimistic scenario where the
recipient is within a mile or two of you. In a mesh scenario, the speed is
going to go way down. In an area urban enough that there are other VolkFi
owners to mesh through, there is almost always going to be cell service. It’s
just a gimmick to let them sell some slightly modified Android phones. My
guess is that they will almost always be connected through the cellular
network. If the user would then like to imagine that they are connected to
some kind of physics-defying mesh network, I suppose that’s nice. They could
probably save on production costs by omitting the 900mhz chip with almost no
effect on the service.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The claim is that they'll always prioritize Volk over LTE. Which is an
interesting promise, because if you're correct, they'd potentially be
prioritizing the slower connection.

------
sliken
I'd happily put a large omnidirectional wifi antenna on my roof to help out
with something like this.... if I could get a fair rate for the bandwidth
used. My city has 70k people or so, and is perfectly flat.

Similarly I'd be willing to help with any p2p type wireless, with a radio,
antenna, and raspberry Pi or similar. Sadly most p2p wireless <-> internet
gateways are proprietary.

~~~
anonymous5133
I've always wondered about this as well. Get independent hobbyists to setup
micro wifi networks. Run all traffic through a vpn or some sort so the
operator doesn't risk their IP/ISP banning their service. Monetize the whole
thing on a pay as you go service. $1/gb and give 70 cents of that to the
independent operators. The big telecoms already have these little mini-wifi
networks in bigger cities that you can get access to but only if you are a
subscriber to their services.

For me personally I would definitely pay the $1/gb to get access to such a
network. Right now, I only use my cell data for e-mail and light web browsing.
The cost of 3g/4g data is simply too expensive for me.

~~~
sliken
I pay $0.05 per GB or so at home ($60 per TB). I'd happily sell my data at a
small profit just to offset whatever the equipment is that's required.

Someone else on this thread mentioned gotenna, which seemed like a similarly
cool idea. Unfortunately they rejected the idea of allowing gotenna <->
internet <-> gotenna via a gateway I offered to write. They already have a
unique id per device and I was going to use a DHT to allow all the gateways to
track which user was behind which gateway. Seemed like a killer app to me,
after all why limit who you message to being within 2-3 hops of you... why not
allow the other few billion folks on the planet?

Sadly they wouldn't allow access to the underlying mesh meta data and instead
required using their extremely limited API.

Having near free widgets that can mesh at low bandwidth (think SMS and IM like
bandwidths) and then pay per GB for faster links seems like an excellent idea.
I can imagine having phones/tablets without a $50 per month WAN charge if it
could mesh and use wifi. Would be handy for sensor networks, home security,
public safety monitoring (like cars going the wrong way on the highway), etc.

~~~
ixwt
This would be a great feature for gotenna. Especially if places near where you
would be using a gotenna have internet access.

~~~
sliken
Well the gotenna network is pretty slow, and internet is not particularly
friendly to store and forward with high latencies. I was thinking more along
the lines of sharing your location (like APRS) and SMS/IM type traffic. That
way you could have cover a large area with minimal infrastructure.

------
josh2600
I would bet almost any amount of money this isn’t going to work.

In any mesh network, the overhead of coordinating nodes dominates network
traffic. This is before you even begin to think about the terms of service
violations for all of these WiFi access points.

~~~
angott
And you haven't even mentioned the fact that mobile phones can move around,
leading to high rates of dropped connections as devices come and go. There's
no way this is going to work.

~~~
remyM
Whoops, my phone connected to someone on a train that just went past! My phone
call just dropped.

~~~
sliken
Think of it the opposite way. You have no coverage, are trying to get a
message out and the nearest gateway is miles away. A moving car/train is close
to you for plenty of time to transfer a few 100 bytes, and someone in the
car/train has a mesh aware widget. It stores a copy and waits to go near a
gateway where it upload it for you.

Sure, it's not as nice as a WAN connection, but the average cellular contract
is pretty expensive per month. Something like $10 per GB, and often a $30 and
up base rate.

So sure, long distance multi-hop mesh stinks for real time voice, but could be
quite usable for other use cases.

~~~
mirashii
Ah, but now you're talking about solving an _additional_ problem, delay
tolerant networking, on top of mesh networking. This adds a whole new layer of
complexity on top of the mesh network, and would probably only work as you say
for a subset of services that are made to handle this type of unreliable
network.

Also many common delay tolerant network implementations rely on message
replication to increase the probability of delivery of the message. This puts
additional bandwidth strain on the inter-node hops of the network, which as
some of the other commenters pointed out, not actually all that high.

~~~
sliken
Indeed, seems only practical for things like SMS/IM type traffic where even a
Long/LAT + 30 character message every few minutes would be quite useful.

------
viraptor
I like the idea, but I'm not sure how the abuse will work on those networks.
There are two possible cases:

1\. Volk data goes out via their gateway (proxied): They get access to your
data. Their IPs get CloudFlare captchas all the time. (Like tor)

2\. Volk data goes out from your router: You get to explain the CP access from
your network. Your home IP gets CloudFlare captchas all the time. You get to
monitor random people's traffic.

Which option is it?

~~~
buildbuildbuild
Our approach at NYC Mesh is to give each donor of home internet a router which
VPNs all mesh traffic through our ASN. This boosts privacy and neutrality for
our mesh users, and protects transit donors from their ISP's interpretation of
the traffic.

------
nickodell
>Volk One devices can connect to each other, from several miles away.

Assuming that a voice call requires 8kbit/s of bandwidth, and assuming that
you have about a watt of power, how feasible is it to connect through a phone
that is a mile away?

Serious question - I don't know how to do the math here.

~~~
amenghra
If you want to learn how to do the math, this is old but a good starting
point:
[http://www.ti.com/lit/ml/slap127/slap127.pdf](http://www.ti.com/lit/ml/slap127/slap127.pdf)

(In general, radio engineering is taught at college-level and requires some
basic math/physica if you are going with “rules of thumb” and fairly advanced
math if you want to understand/derive exact equations).

------
jewel
This sounds great. One idea I had to stop abuse was to force traffic from a
phone to route out to the public Internet through its own base station.

That would require a lot of hops, in some cases, but the traffic could short
circuit through others' base stations back to their own through the Internet,
without originating the traffic from the intermediaries. I wrote up more about
this here:

[https://stevenjewel.com/2014/01/android-
mesh/](https://stevenjewel.com/2014/01/android-mesh/)

In this particular case they could originate the traffic from Volk servers
instead.

Also, people here may be interested in GoTenna, a portable mesh network
hotspot that has been out for a few years, at roughly $75 each.

------
grizzles
That's cool. A few years back I ran an indiegogo campaign for a static mesh
network. It encoded geohashes into ipv6 addresses and used physical location
as a waypoint for next hop routing using Vincentys algorithm. Clever solutions
were designed to handle local congestion and mobile devices. Ofc it went
nowhere, but maybe Volk can steal those ideas...

Another idea to borrow: The campaign also shipped with a global WIFI app. Eg.
you put your WIFI password into the global database and could use the ones
other people shared.

------
amenghra
Sounds a bit like Fon from the 2005s.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fon_(company)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fon_\(company\))

------
doitLP
I don’t get the invite model. Ask someone already invited to send you an
invite? I guess it prevents spam reservations but I don’t have Facebook or
twitter, so I guess I’m out of luck.

~~~
mdaniel
I was also curious, and found
[https://volkfi.com/whyinvite](https://volkfi.com/whyinvite) which has a
constructive sounding heading

> Why is Volk Fi invite-only

followed by _blather blather about the technology_ and then finally some
invite-sounding text of

> But, because Volk Fi is crowdsourced, it needs a certain user density in
> order to have full coverage and reliability

which seems to run directly in contradiction to why one would want the system
to be invite-only. Can you imagine starting a BitTorrent service, and then
trying to ensure the swarm stayed _small_ by only telling your roommates? I
guess that's why I'm not in marketing.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
Speaking of Bittorrent... This is a YC '19 company and...

[https://igamerss.com/index.php/2019/03/19/here-are-
the-85-st...](https://igamerss.com/index.php/2019/03/19/here-are-the-85-st..).

"Volk Wi-fi: Volk is making an Android smartphone with a free information
plan, no service required. The co-founders say they’re utilizing long-range
wi-fi to share connections and construct a community of telephones. Co-Founder
Greg Hazel was the __Chief Architect at Bittorrent __, whereas co-founder
Straya Markovic was the lead engineer at mesh messaging platform Firechat. "

So yeah, they should know better.

------
slackfan
These data collection scams are getting more and more elaborate.

------
chpmrc
Very interesting. This website is completely unusable on Chrome 72 (MacBook
Pro 15" Mid-2015) but is smooth as butter on Safari.

~~~
Matthias247
It's absolutely unusable for me on Safari. Scrolling is less than 1fps.
Haven't tried another browser.

~~~
ksec
Same here. It was literally killing my CPU.

------
padraic7a
What's with the name? Sounds very iffy to me. Posts like this on the subreddit
don't help:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/VolkFi/comments/b0xpmn/volkfi_viral...](https://www.reddit.com/r/VolkFi/comments/b0xpmn/volkfi_viral_stormtroopers/)

~~~
24gttghh
Volk is German for 'People'. It's like the English 'Folk'. That reddit link
sounds like just a single dude trying to expand the reach, who isn't
affiliated with volkfi, but I would say he is trolling using the name like
"stormtroopers"...

------
linuxdude314
I love the amount of unfettered optimism in this thread, but lets be clear
this likely will amount to vaporware (at least the mesh part).

Using an invite only system to bootstrap a distributed network that inherently
relies on network effect makes absolutely no sense.

Having an amateurish website that consumes so much resources it doesn't render
faster than 5 FPS on an MBP should make you question the marketing prowess of
this company.

Straya Markovic, one of the lead engineers for FireChat is a co-founder. This
is both a pro and a con. Like most engineer led companies they don't seem to
understand the tremendous effort required to bootstrap this network and focus
only on the technology aspects in their marketing.

------
tsukurimashou
Specs for those having issues with the website:

Display: 6.2 inches, 1080 x 2280 pixels, 402ppi, Aspect Ratio: 19:9

Sensors: Fingerprint, Hall, Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Proximity, RGB Ambient
Light Sensor, Electronic Compass, Sensor Hub

Ports: USB C, Support USB Audio, nano-SIM slot

Battery: 3700 mAh (non-removable)

Audio: Bottom-facing speaker, 3-microphone with noise cancellation, Support
AANC, Dirac HD Sound®, Dirac Power Sound®

Vibration: OHaptic vibration motor

Connectivity: Volk Fi, LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth

Dimensions: 155.2 x 76.1 x 7.7 mm

Weight: 179g

Color: Midnight Black / Snow White, Anodized Aluminum & Glass

Operating System: Android

CPU: Snapdragon 845 (Octa-core, up to 2.5GHz)

GPU: Adreno 630

RAM: 4GB LPDDR4X

Storage: 64GB or 256GB UFS 2.1 2-LANE

Camera: Dual 16 x 16 MP, Auto-HDR, 4K resolution video at 30fps, 1080P
resolution video at 60fps, LED Flash, Aperture: f/1.7

------
njcomputermedic
I wrote an article about Volk-fi for those of you looking for more
information.

[https://1fixcomputermedic.com/volk-fi-promises-free-cell-
pho...](https://1fixcomputermedic.com/volk-fi-promises-free-cell-phone-
service-launch-date-december-2019/)

------
tomglynch
I'm concerned that providing a bounce for someone else's call will use large
amount of battery. This means, trying to conserve battery won't be possible if
people keep using your phone to bounce off.

------
kwhitefoot
The hard part will be getting enough such mobiles out in the market for the
mesh to ever work and getting the price down low enough for people who are not
ever so interested to buy it.

Presumably this is using something like Wimax so it shouldn't be difficult for
other players to introduce compatible devices. In fact it should be possible
to make a Wimax version of the portable Mifi routers that connect to mobile
networks then you could use your existing devices and some kind of VOIP
solution.

------
teamspirit
When I first heard about Project Fi, this is what I imagined it to be like. I
was a little disappointed when I found out it was just glorified wifi-calling.

------
noway421
This is amazing. I think it delivers on the promise of [https://n-o-
d-e.net/hyperboria.html](https://n-o-d-e.net/hyperboria.html) much more than
Hyperboria+cjdns itself. Very excited, I expect there could be a compatibility
layer with existing mesh networks which use cjdns.

------
sequoia
Website just about crashed my browser. I hope I can find out what it's about
here.

~~~
weddpros
confirmed... worst website experience this far in 2019! and I tried both
Chrome and Safari!

Seriously Volk Fi: fix this asap (like before you continue working on your
business)

------
TheSpiceIsLife
How can internet connectivity be free?

Doesn’t _someone_ need to pay for a connection?

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
To answer my own question, as per the FAQ:

 _Volk Fi counts data usage and bytes shared via WiFi. Every user gets the
amount they share, unlimited. If a Volk user consumes more data than they
share in a month, there is a 5GB data cap. After that, the user can pay the
super cheap price of $1 /GB for additional data._

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
I would love for this to be just an app on a standard Android device.

~~~
amorphic
Apparently because their special phones have "new, long-range radio hardware"
that makes this all possible.

But radio technologies are pretty widely understood and while I'm no expert
I've not heard of anything that could achieve what they're suggesting. So I'll
remain skeptical until I understand better what that "long-range radio
hardware" is and how it makes such a mesh network feasible.

------
Nokinside
This type of networking will become more feasible with 5G because it has
unlicensed spectrum and better support for radio convergence. 5G home routers
might need just little configuration.

------
snvzz
This would work if the mesh was standardized and royalty-free, so that any
company could make hardware for it.

As long as it's a mesh network restricted to one company... no dice.

------
Jemm
I would love to see a version for amateur radio that uses amateur bands with
more power. It would of course need to be un-encrypted but that is fine with
me.

~~~
24gttghh
Ham radio already does this to a certain extent I believe:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet)

------
Aloha
This is a product I might buy - if I could actually buy it.

------
albruno
Hi everyone, I really want to test this network but I have no invitation, can
someone send me? allexbruno@protonmail.ch

------
max_
This is slightly off-topic, but why don't we have WiFi networks that work on a
scale as large as Cellular networks?

~~~
rocqua
Pure WiFi lacks the range. Moreover, there is very little on inter-working.

The cellular networks standards, though truly horrible, have done an
incredible job of allowing a connection to jump between base-stations, and to
allow a user to connect to almost any base-station. WiMax was an attempt to do
something like WiFi with higher range. But it lacked the whole inter-working
back-end that would allow a user to seamlessly jump between base-points.

Moreover, a network operator tends to have a lot more 'body' if only because
it works on licensed spectrum. This means, at the very least, that if things
go wrong you can sue it. Thus, there is at least a simple basis for trust. For
WiFi access, since anyone can easily get on it, trust is much more a no go.
Not just regarding malicious users, but also about simple reliability.

~~~
acct1771
An incredible job at enabling Feds (and any other amateur!) to use
Stingrays/cell catchers

------
layoutIfNeeded
I'm not sure I would be comfortable with running a base station in my pocket
all the time.

------
CKN23-ARIN
(YC '19)

------
arthurcolle
You should add a Bitcoin option for checkout/reservation.

------
pzo
it reminded me of similar project open garden
[https://www.opengarden.com/](https://www.opengarden.com/)

------
boulevard
There will be serious security concerns with this, opening so many
possibilities for Man in the Middle attack.

~~~
gruez
Just encrypt everything in transit ?

------
womd
pls someone invite me

------
womd
pls someone invite me - i don't do social networks

~~~
nighthawk24
[https://volkfi.com/buy?code=6BqA19M](https://volkfi.com/buy?code=6BqA19M)

~~~
albruno
hi brother, I do not know anyone who has a volk fi but I really want to test
this network and the cell phone, can you send me an invitation?
allexbruno@protonmail.ch

------
amai
Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Smartphone!

------
_pmf_
Name reminds of
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksempf%C3%A4nger](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksempf%C3%A4nger)

Probably intentional.

~~~
sirlantis
That prefix certainly comes with baggage. There were a lot of affordable
"Volks-" (read as: "for the people") products created by the DAF (German
Labour Front) between 1933 and 1945. The more (internationally) known ones are
the Volkswagen, Volksempfänger (radio receiver), Volkskühlschrank
(refrigerator), Volksgasmaske (gas mask).

On the other hand, the infamous "BILD" tabloid started using that prefix brand
again in 2002, with the Volks-PC and has been marketing 200 products with that
prefix since and other companies/projects/products followed (like
Volks.Fahrrad - which had to rename because of the product proximity to
Volkswagen).

