If you\’ve attended a music festival in the past few years, there\’s no need to explain the hell that is phone service. With hundreds of thousands of attendees at the major gatherings, getting in touch with friends on the grounds has become a lost cause. To some, it can be annoyance when trying to coordinate with large groups, to others it can be extremely dangerous when dealing with one emergency or another.
The clear problem, no matter the festival, is the mass amounts of phone users trying to connect simultaneously. The more devices trying to connect to cell towers, the slower the speeds. Fear not, though, as San Francisco-based app developer Open Garden seems to have come up with a solution.
Open Garden\’s Firechat is a newly designed smartphone messaging app that allows users within a defined radius to send and receive messages without being connected to their provider. By creating a \”mesh network\” of connected phones, messages are able to pass through the devices to their intended recipient, all via Bluetooth or WiFi. With Firechat, the more users, the better!
This new software has already been implemented at this year\’s Burning Man, as well as several protests in Hong Kong and Mexico. With an app dependent on immense groups of people for the best connectivity, the festival scene is the obvious next step.
