How To Chat When The Internet Is Down

Dhir Acharya - Dec 18, 2019


How To Chat When The Internet Is Down

During Internet shutdowns, it seems almost impossible to chat with your friends and family, but there's a way for you to overcome that.

In an age when most of the world is relying on the Internet for communication, just an outage on a social network like Facebook or Instagram can make a lot of people worry, let alone an entire Internet shutdown. Without the Internet, it’s extremely hard, if not impossible, to reach our friends and family from far away to make sure they are fine during crises as well as to update news and information on places where crises are taking place.

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Internet shutdown in India lasted for several days

Worse, governments have taken advantage of this to control protests, with a recent incident where the Indian government shut down the Internet in the states of Meghalaya and Assam for days.

But if you are even in such a situation, there’s one way to keep in touch with your beloved. FireChat is a peer-to-peer chatting app relying on a mesh network for communication between devices. Simply speaking, the app generates a network of its own on your phone using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, helping you communicate with other users thanks to their network, which forms a long chain of devices that are connected to one another.

How does it work?

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FireChat

All FireChat users need to turn on their Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Like a spider web, the app will connect these networks so that the same network can deliver messages. the connectivity here is like ShareIT, but it forms a network for sharing content between phones on a far broader level involving many devices connected.

Users can either chat with one person or create group chats to talk in groups. They can also share audio, photos among other types of files in the chat boxes. When the Internet connection is available, FireChat works like a normal messenger app like WhatsApp.

This app is a helping hand when there’s no Internet connection, but it can only be really helpful if there are many users enough. The more people sign up to the app, the stronger and broader the network becomes, hence faster transferring of messages.

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FireChat is secure as all messages are encrypted

How secure is Firechat?

While the idea of messages moving from one device to another before reaching the desired recipient may shake you, there’s no need to worry because messages on FireChat are encrypted. That means except for the sender and the receiver, no one else can see the message.

FireChat helped protesters in Hong Kong

Hong Kong also shut down the Internet and scrutinized the data transferred during protests in 2014 against the Chinese government.

To avoid being spied on, Hong Kong protesters used this app to secure their conversations in the chaos. Besides FireChate, they also used Bridgefy to communicate.

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Hong Kong protesters used FireChat to keep themselves safe

FireChat in India

When it was launched in 2014, FireChat is not only used by those affected by Internet shutdowns from time to time, but it was also used by Indian citizens in places whose network coverage was bad.

According to Open Garden, FireChat’s parent company, Indian users created 500,000 chat rooms with about seven sessions each week. An average user spent 2.14 munites on a session.

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