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Broadband From On High But Not In Orbit
jw writes: "The NY Times has a story about Angel Technologies, a St. Louis company that plans to provide high- speed Internet access in an unusual way: using solar-powered, high-altitude manned aircraft built to cruise at 51,000 feet... In addition to the expense of building or acquiring three planes for each metropolitan area, Angel's complicated plan involves using huge quantities of jet fuel, hiring two pilots for each plane and making three takeoffs and landings every day for each city where its service is available..." Piloting one of these sounds like a pretty high-stress job; if this should come to pass I hope they get every other week off like Houston channel pilots do. Zeppelins, satellites, solar-powered planes ... what about kites?
*whine* oh, it costs too much
*whack* What did it cost Iridum to put up it's satellites? $2 billion +?
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*whine* Where will they get pilots?
*whack* A lot of pilots have to get a lot of hours in jets before they can fly commercial airlines. Most wind up joining the air nat'l guard or air force so they can get the hours. This is a great way to get highly experienced pilots. Takeoffs and landings are the two places where most accidents happen, and most pilots spend a lot of hime working on those. Three flights a day will give a lot of experience.
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*whine* It will use too much fuel
*whack* Probably not as much as you think. They'll be very high up, so be rather effieient. They're not hauling people or too much equipment, so those jets will be very efficient.
This won't help the signals in urban centers because the aircraft will not be allowed to orbit directly overhead in tight circles.
The FAA won't allow it in the US.
IIRC, the ping to GEO and back is around half a second. The ping 102,000 feet (51,000 up and back) is somewhat less noticable.
If the service can turn a gross revenue of $50 per subscriber, and they can get 10,000 subscribers per market, then they can probably turn a operating profit after they amortize the cost of the aircraft over a few years.
Don Negro
Don Negro
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This is expensive. THey were moving forward with a new line of blimps (though they might have been zepplins (sp), as they could put these on station for a week at a time. A beautiful solution, but then the Soviets folded and there was no point . . .
It also would have provided a use for the Strategic Helium Reserve. We keep it for the navy's blimps, even though they haven't had them for over 50 years . . .
hawk
Read the article again. Which part of "solar-powered" didn't you understand?
I'm suprised the article mentions manned aircraft. The original proposal I read for "aerosats" was aircraft that would take off under remote control, get to cruising altitude then go autonomous until they needed to descend in a few weeks at which point they'd be taken over by remote control again.
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What is the quote? "Flying is three hours of absolute boredom followed by ten minuts of sheer terror," or something along those lines. And that guy was in the military. Having flown a little bit myself, I can say that most flying is boring anyways. Me personally, I stick to hang-gliding :) Much more intense.
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
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Check out SkyStation. Their proposed system uses a statospheric platform held aloft by helium. Electric motors powered by photovoltaic cells (and betteries for the night) are used for stationkeeping. Sort of like a satellite in very low geostationary orbit.
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Pyrotechnics
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
AOL fighter pilots gunning down Angel Internet ISP planes...
or... if you will..
"our server went down, and we lost 2 men."
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I post links to stuff here
The distance will only add about .1 ms to your ping.
I can live with an extra 1/10 millisecond ping.
51K feet = 9.66 miles
9.66mi/c = 5.19e-5 seconds
2way = 1.02 x10^-4
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The reason you can't uplink fast is transmitter power.
Geosynch is 22,500 miles away
This will be 10 miles away.
At 1/2500 the distance, you can get faster speeds because you require a LOT less power per bit. Basically, we're talking about a flying wireless transciver.
Your connection speed will be fine.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
you're not going to get signal*
Basically, you're walking down Broadway talking happily, you turn onto 52nd, and your connection is dropped.
The signal really has to rain down from above for coverage to be decent (after all, not much of Manhattan has a direct line of sight to the top of the ESB, but all of it has a direct line of sight to, say, the sun)
*no matter how many times you shout, "Main screen turn on!"
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for everytime someone proposed flying a plane or using a baloon for a communications repeater. It just isn't going to happen. I would love to have a list of names of the investors on this cuz I've got a bridge for sale.
Reality: You either put a bunch of stations high up on mountains or buildings or you put one expensive station in orbit. Either way your cost for coverage is going to be less than some manned aircraft system and far more reliable.
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Actually for someone that is trying to move up to the airlines this would be a great job. You could build your jet time 8 hours a day. In one year figureing a 40 hour work week you would have 2000 hours. Lots of young pilots will love this.
And the cost of running it will not be to bad. The only real question is will they get enough customers.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
1. Actually the engines on the plane are super efficent. It burns jetfuel which is a byproduct of gasoline production and is actually cheaper than gasoline. At 51,000 ft it will be in such thin air that it will probably have a lower fuel burn rate than a semitruck.
2. At 51k there is little weather or air traffic. That is above where most fighters can operate much less airliners.
3. The pilots will be low paid by airline standards. Mostlikly they will be low time pilots that want to work for the airlines and will be in it to build their hours.
4. It would not be a bad gig for someone that loves to fly. Bring a book and you and the co trade off. Plus you would have a spectacular view.
It could work and work well. It could also be used to supply emergence communications in event of a natural disaster and mobile networks. The only thing is there enought users to payfor it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The is another company Platforms Wireless that has a better system: they tether a lighter-than-air craft at 15,000 feet. It covers a 70-mile radius. Sounds a lot cheaper than paying for 24/7 pilots.
Also, I thought there was a slashdot story awhile back about an unmanned airplane that would use solar power to generate hydrogen during the daytime, and then run on fuel cells during the night. It could stay up indefinitely.
Los Angeles (AP) -- AOL Time-Warner announced today that it would aquire the Los Angeles ISP startup CrazyFarm, which began service to customers over its moonbounce-laser high speed data connection last week. Steve Case had this to say about the recent aquisition: "All your base are belong to us. Ha ha ha ha."
Los Angeles, CA - In what seems like another completely ludicrous way to get the 'net' into homes, Los Angeles based CrazyFarm has announced that it will install a laser-based internet service, where each connection will have a laser pointed at... the moon! The moon will house a large facility that will communicate via lasers, providing 1.5MB/s of service, to users on the Earth's surface. "The major problem we haven't solved yet," said the CTO, "is that the moon is only visible to half the earth at once, and since we need a direct line of site for our service, we are planning to blow up the moon into 2, possibly 3, fragments, each of which will host our ISP moon bases."
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python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
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crazy dynamite monkey
CMGI owns the patent on that.
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It's like we turned the clock back a year+... I thought crazy ideas were out, in favor of profitable ideas?
Oh well, the crazy ideas were a lot of fun.
It does sound like it would be economical to replace all those cell phone towers with one high-flying antenna... but a baloon sounds more efficient than a plane.
The article said "Solar powered" -- I don't read any mention of Solar Powered on their web page.
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If they're solar-powered, what do you need jet fuel for?
Unfortunately, when most ISPs crash, they don't take a city block with them.
--SC
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But if your ISP crashes, it really crashes.
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Burt Rutan, aerodynamics god, of Scaled Composites was talking about this back in 1998. Apparently, Angel Technologies will be using his Proteus reconfigurable aircraft, which apparently designed with the telecomm purpose in mind long before Angel came along.
Sorry about no direct line to Proteus. The site's all gussied up with frames.
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and this looks like the most god-awful BORING thing on Earth. Sounds like Guard Rail flights. Eight hours of mind numbing boredom.
I would like to see the turn over rate of their pilots. Bet it's higher than the dot coms at the height of the stock market boom.
DanH
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It's just another dumb idea that got press because all those tech journalists are desperate for anything new to write about.
sulli
RTFJ.
Despite the insanely high cost of jet-fuel, what I am really concerned about here is the eventual strain on the environment should this prove popular.
Think about it. Most of the fuel in jet engines burns away. Most of the exhaust is in the form of water and CO2, but there is a small amount of hydrocarbon exhaust.
I would think that multiple 'around the clock' flights would start putting out non-negligable amounts of greenhouse-gas and hyrdrocarbon pollution. This is not a good thing, because there are better, cheaper ways to do this.
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My internet connection just went down over Minneapolis!
Dancin Santa
What about Mir :)
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