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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?
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))"
But if your ISP crashes, it really crashes.
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Je t'aime Stéphanie