Neowin

If your mobile phone has a speaker and a microphone, you may soon be able to use them to transfer files to other mobile phones without the need for any special hardware. That's the promise of a recently published paper by Microsoft Research that describes what it calls Secure Peer-to-Peer Acoustic NFC.

Usually NFC (Near Field Communication) requires that a special chip be put inside a mobile phone or tablet in order to work. However, there are still a ton of mobile phones out there without NFC hardware. The Microsoft Research paper from the company's India team has come up with a software only solution for all those phones, which has the name Dhwani.

In very basic terms, once the Dhwani software is installed on mobile phones, one of them can use sound to transmit data via the speaker to another phone's microphone. According to the team that created Dhwani, they have been able to use the software to transfer data at a rate of 2.4 kilobits per second. Yes, that's very slow but the researchers say it would be enough to enable a phone with the software to send a payment to a store counter or another phone, among other applications.

What about if another phone is nearby? Microsoft Research has that covered as well with what it callsJamSecure. The paper's authors summarizes the technique stating,  " ... the receiver intentionally jams the signal it is trying to receive, thereby stymieing eaves-droppers, but then uses self-interference cancellation to successfully decode the incoming message."

http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-research-comes-up-with-way-to-transfer-files-via-sound

Those guys just continue to amaze me! The only division of Microsoft I actually like.

Those guys at MS research are awesome :)

Back in the 1970s, we called that accoustic modem. It was basically a rubber device you clamped your old fashioned telephone onto. Wow, somebody just realised you can do this without actually clamping the phone (provided there is no noise). Only took, like, 30 years to "invent" this?

Wow, who'd think that simple modem technology (used as early as the 1940s) can still fascinate todays Microsoft enthusiasts?!

And the incredible speed! It would take just about 17 hours to transfer one average image of my digital camera!

But seriously, apart from the fact that it's anything but a new idea (and I'm not talking about modems in general - the audio hardware in smartphones has been used for years to transfer digital data) - why is the speed so low? Analogue modems managed to transmit up to 57 kilobits per second, over telephone lines that only had a bandwidth of about 3000Hz. They should be able to achieve significantly higher transfer rates than analogue modems.

I agree, that is way to slow to be much use. At that transfer rate, all of the phones that don't have NFC chips would be replaced with a new phone before the first transmission would be complete.

"According to the team that created Dhwani, they have been able to use the software to transfer data at a rate of 2.4 kilobits per second."

Erm...promising maybe down the road is they can increase that.

I wish they would stop holding technology back

not really.  the data transfer rate is dependant on the fequency.  the slower the frequency the slower the possible data transfer.

audiable sound is 20 - 20k hz,. orders of maganitude slower than anything useful.