[dTal]

That's not at all true, phones have both WiFi and Bluetooth, both of which are perfectly capable of communicating peer to peer. Bluetooth file transfer worked 20 years ago. Wifi is physically capable but the software usually requires one phone to be the Daddy and host a hotspot, because god forbid an IP subnet exist without routable internet i.e. the mothership. There is a standard, "Wi-Fi Direct", that solves this - it's been around since 2009 and everyone implements it except Apple, so naturally nobody uses it.

Perhaps you mean p2p phone calls. Fine - although I have a hard time believing that the 900 Mhz radios capable of talking to a tower literal miles away are physically incapable of talking to each other. They're just programmed not to. In any case, the inconvenience and unreliability of sending files 3 feet, vs the streamlined experience of sending them via a corporate datacenter thousands of miles away, demonstrates that this is not about hardware. This is about software, and by extension about control.

[wolvoleo]

Bluetooth and WiFi on a mobile device don't have enough range for this stuff. You need to be too close to other participants.

Hence LoRa. Yes, 5G would be an option but the licensed spectrum (and firmware restriction) makes that impossible.

[dTal]

For the purposes of this thread, "this stuff" consists of:

>It's absurd that modern phones can talk to satellites hundreds of kilometers above, but not to other phones a few meters away in the same room, airplane cabin, train car etc.

Common everyday filesharing, not meshnet fantasies.

[atomicthumbs]

5G NR radios could also be capable of communicating peer to peer long distance if manufacturers (phone or baseband?) wanted them to. It's in the spec.

[lxgr]

Exactly: Perfectly capable in hardware, almost perfectly locked down in software.