[maeon3]

I had an idea, about 90% of the time I need internet on my smartphone, my car is between me and the cell tower, or if not it is within half a mile of me.

Cell phone companies could put "always on" cell phone repeater in my car, drinking from a large li-ion battery that is charged by the engine, so when my smartphone doesn't have enough punch to reach the cell tower, it has enough power to reach my car's repeater, which has enough power to reach the cell tower. If I could charge the company 0.001 cents every time someone else's phone routes through my repeater, the company could save billions on cell towers. Use the nation's cars as a mobile cell phone network. A Billion dollar idea right there.

[rhino42]

While this sounds like a good idea on the surface, it won't work.

Pretty much all cellular communications nowadays uses CDMA of one flavor or another. An important property of CDMA is that any signal that I send to the tower actually causes more noise for the other users in the network. This id called being interference limited. For this reason, there is a ton of effort going into power control, so that reach user sends just enough power to reach the tower but not more. Your cell phone COULD boost it's transmit power to reach the tower, but it would ruin everyone else's connection.

[eurleif]

So what's to stop people from hacking their cell phones to break things for everyone else?

[rhino42]

Cell towers can detect the receive power of any given cell phone on their network. If you just hacked your cell phone to use high transmit strength, they would know and could kick you off their network.

I can imagine that you could rig your cell phone (or another device) to transmit at high power to jam the connection, but the FCC would have something to say about it. If you're caught, I'd expect civil and criminal reprisals...

[bdonlan]

Stiff fines. If suddenly the only signal the tower's picking up is yours, it doesn't take too long to figure out who is responsible.

[eurleif]

Prepaid phone, bought with cash, and left in a public place?

[bdonlan]

If you keep it up it can be triangulated, I suppose. Other than that, the tower would have to shift everyone to a different frequency.

[corecirculator]

look up pico-cells.

[michaporat]

Not sure you would want that. An always-on repeater in your car means every time you are moving away from a base station, the repeater would have to power up in order to continue the reception, even if you are not using your smartphone. This is a recipe for a generation infested with radiation-effected diseases...

[sklnd]

Do you have particular insight into disease caused by non-ionizing radiation that the rest of the world is missing? I've seen no study that has been able to conclusively link non-ionizing radiation to human health problems, or really any other effect beyond a slight warming of tissue.

Without hard proof of such an effect from radio transmissions, your post falls into the bucket of baseless scaremongering. Behavior like this only results in impeding technological progress.

[michaporat]

The effect of non-ionizing radiation is well know here is one for example... quoting "At present, the fact that NIR exerts both stimulatory and inhibitory effects on different physiological cellular parameters is rather unquestionable." Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9587915

The impact on specific diseases is still in its infancy, and thus shows little results. I doubt any oncologist would have install your proposed solution...

[a-priori]

I'm going to need a whole lot more than one random study from 1998 to believe that. The whole idea seems very cooky and alarmist.