SPANs are useful under circumstances when the regular network is overloaded or unavailable, such as conferences, music festivals, or natural disasters, and have been popular in Australia and Latin America.
Since Wi-Fi is present and embedded in all smart phones today, this earlier technology was adapted for smartphones.
Smartphone ad hoc networks may be useful in situations that include: In Apple Inc. iPhones released with iOS version 7.0 and higher, multipeer connectivity[9] APIs (application programmable interfaces) are enabled and provided to allow Apple iPhones to operate in peer-to-peer ad hoc mesh networking mode.
With 700+ millions[10] of iPhones being used globally, ad hoc peer-to-peer networks will gain pervasive presence almost instantly.
This empowers millions of Android phones with ad hoc mesh connectivity and networking capabilities.