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

Space Junk

[Technician]

Great, more junk to track as it fails and starts to return. Hope the commercial aircraft can avoid all of it.

Re:Ouate de phoque

[rosewood]

Ill prolly get hit with some stupid - mod for this but fyi

I just rebooted my xp box last week when ATI released new drivers and I wanted to squeeze some more Mhz out of my OC. Uptime? 4 weeks. My Fiance's XP box curently has a 2 month uptime and she does daily DivX encoding. He Parent's XP box has about the same uptime and that has apache running on it doing family picture serving. When new pics go up, it gets about 300 hits pretty quickly. Granted, nothing amazing but its work. Also, their son - my soon to be brother in law - uses that box as his gaming box.

I used win98 and 95 and still encounter it. Ive used 2k and XP. The whole reliabilty thing was gone with Win2k... at least for user and small serving

I have no experience in large serving apps so i dont speak of that

802.11

[erpbridge]

Hey Cringely, when are you gonna put some passive repeaters on these babies?