Weather Balloons as Wireless Telephone Technology

Under the plan described in this article submitted by reader RoscoHead, "Space Data would use un-tethered weather balloons launched daily by the National Weather Service to carry lightweight wireless communications equipment to an altitude of 100,000 feet. There, at the 'SkySite,' they would relay voice and data signals to remote areas at a fraction of the cost of installing cell towers or launching satellites, company officials say."

Comments

NASA's Helios

[Oink.NET]

Check out NASA's Helios which uses solar power and a fuel cell concept. They expect it to fly above 50,000 ft for 96 hours. ZDNet has a story about using it for broadband internet connections.

I realize both the weather balloons and Helios are just means to an end, but using these things for broadband internet would be way cooler than the US's second-rate cell technology, which is what they want to use the weather balloons for.

HAPS

[haunebu]

High-Altitude Platform Systems are one of the three different delivery mechanisms defined by the 3GPP for next-generation mobile services. The systems being designed around them go well beyond this weather baloon business.

It's amazing how little press these systems have received so far, since it would take hundreds of well-placed terrestrial towers or thousands of miles of buried fiber to provide similar coverage and capacity.