Haha, I remember that conversation. It was about radio chipset / terminal manufacturers plus car makers silently conspiring to build up computing power, battery capacity and unlicensed band spectrum capabilities into terminals to make them capable of supporting IP services over a mesh network. And one good day they make “the switch” to the mesh, and declare telcos virtually obsolete overnight. Very short range comms would be smartphone-to-smartphone, and larger hops could be made car-to-car. I imagined that in the early thousands, in the dawn of UMTS, but today’s capabilities already allow this over WiFi frequencies and for simple applications like IM. In fact, there are a couple apps that do exactly that now: MeshMe, Jott, FireChat, Serval…