Nice Wired News piece about applying mesh routing to cellular telephony. Why rely on congested towers (that grow more congested when you add users to their cell) when you can have every handset in your neighborhood relay signal for every other handset (and get a network where capacity increases with the addition of new users)?
SRI's PacketHop software is embedded in the phone. The signal of the device then jumps from handset to handset -– which must also have the software -– until it reaches its final destination. Theoretically, it could work from New York to California if there were enough phones lined up in the right places. Realistically, this would be a solution for short-distance calls.