In May this year, techcrunch reported on a new app that lets your mobile phone share its connectivity with others and find others who in turn share theirs, a step which should increase the efficiency and speed with which you can connect.
Open Garden Lets You Crowdsource Your Mobile Connectivity is the title of that article.
Despite its name, Open Garden does not seem to be open source itself. It is a commercial startup providing freely downloadable software. Open Garden seeks to tear down the walls that separate phones from one another and prevent sharing of available connection bandwidth. As it is, each mobile phone has to go through its own provider to reach anyone else. If an area is not covered well by my own provider, and if I can find a good soul who, like myself, runs Open Garden, then I can use their line to make that urgent call or get connected to the internet to look up where I am and where I should be going.
Here is a video on vimeo, introducing the concept:
Open Garden beta from Open Garden on Vimeo.
For now, connectivity works in bluetooth mode and is available for Android, Windows and Mac. There are plans to widen access mode to multiple channels, and to add multi-hop capability … later.
Have any readers tried this out? If so, let us know how it worked.