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Airships Tested As Two-Way Telecom Beacons

Posted by timothy on from the bouncing-around dept.

sgups writes "The Toronto Star (no registration required:)) is reporting about this firm which will supply spherical airships that will be used as high-flying telecommunications platforms to supply two-way Internet access across the United States and into Mexico and Canada. The article explains little of the technology though."

24 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Oh lord the humanity! by netnerd.caffinated · · Score: 4, Funny

    the airship explodes cause it was filled with hydrogen & millions of internet weenies are left stranded with no pr0n

    --


    You tried your best, & you failed miserably,
    The lesson is:
    Never Try
  2. Cool! by Miroku · · Score: 4, Interesting

    High speed internet access for those of us who live out in the woods would be great, since sattelite is incredibly expensive...

    As long as they don't get shot down as UFO's....

    --
    ~The Incredible Xan~
    "Saying that men can't be lesbians is gender discrimination."
    1. Re:Cool! by the_2nd_coming · · Score: 4, Insightful

      who says these will be cheap?

      --



      I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
  3. New UFO excuse #3462 by Asterax · · Score: 4, Funny

    Now the government can use the airships as excuses for what you "really" saw in the sky at night, not a UFO. Good bye weather balloon excuse.

  4. Very Cool, especially for rural areas. by Ashetos · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What about the same solution as an alternative to Cell Phone towers?

    1. Re:Very Cool, especially for rural areas. by GlassHeart · · Score: 4, Informative
      A cell tower is the point where "wire" ends and "wireless" begins. As such, one end of it is tied to the cellular network, which in turn is tied to the land line network.

      With a blimp, the end going into the cellular network must also be wireless. What you've then introduced is a wireless repeater, which consumes twice the bandwidth compared to a land-based tower.

      The angles at which land-based towers transmit allows its beams to penetrate windows for indoor coverage. A blimp that flies higher would not be able to penetrate several floors (or even just ordinary roofing) to provide the same coverage, especially right underneath itself.

      If the blimp cannot be kept stationary enough for doppler sync purposes, then you'll need significantly more complex software to deal with the fact that both the blimp and the handset are moving.

      Not impossible, but there are significant obstacles.

  5. Technical Hurdle by StefanJ · · Score: 5, Funny
    They're going to need really huge Pringles(tm) cans to support wireless at that altitude.

    Of course, if they succeed, we'll have big potatoid wafers the size of dinner plates.

    Stefan

  6. Great idea by Adam9 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    In order to reach the same coverage area as the 10 Stratellites, the company would have to install wireless equipment in more than 14,000 cellular towers at a capital cost of $56 million plus annual tower lease cost of $67 million, Lively said.

    The new United States Homeland Security agency, created in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, wants telecommunications around major cities improved, and companies have been scrambling to find alternatives to cell towers and landlines, Colting said.

    Great, they want reliability in case of a disaster so they think combining 14,000 towers into 10 big balloons is going to be better. Might not be a single point of failure.. but I'd prefer 14,000 points of failure rather than 10.

  7. Sad day by unterderbrucke · · Score: 4, Funny

    "spherical airships"

    The Hindenburg and Goodyear blimps ruined the good name of blimp forever. Now were are reduced to puzzling out such obtuse synonyms as "spherical airships".

  8. Huh? by Em+Emalb · · Score: 5, Funny

    "The Toronto Star (no registration required:)) "

    What? Registration not required? What am I supposed to bitch about now?

    Well, hell, guess I have to read the article now.

    *SIGH*

    --
    Sent from your iPad.
  9. What kind of internet outage shall we have today? by Quaoar · · Score: 5, Funny

    1. Denial of service
    2. Fried router
    3. Blimp attack

    --
    I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
  10. Nasa has a better idea by UrGeek · · Score: 5, Interesting

    http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Projects/Pathfinder/

    or search for "Nasa solar-powered Pathfinder" in your favorite search engine.

    This is a solar-powered drone that eventually will fly 24 hours (carrying batteries for night).

  11. Now that's what I call: 'getting high' by Newer+Guy · · Score: 4, Funny

    Spherical airships running on Volkswagen engines for the transmission of spam and pr0n. Hmmmmm...I've had ideas like this before. Usually after several bong hits....

  12. In other news... by bobdotorg · · Score: 4, Funny

    GNU terrorists have hijacked the WiFi blimp and have already bounced into Microsoft's headquarters five times.

    --
    __ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
  13. More Balloons and AUVs by dailywireless · · Score: 4, Informative
    Daily Wireless has more on Sky High Wi-Fi including Skytower which uses a solar-powered airplane. It has been used for 802.11b-enabled aerial photography. Skytower is designed to circle overhead, unmanned, for as long as six months, drawing power from the sun by day and from fuel cells by night.

    The new homeland security department will require a massive global network. But transoceanic fiber is easily cut and the $800 million TDRS replenishment program with three satellites doesn't have the bandwidth. Intercepted SIGINT data is reportedly transmitted to Earth on a 24 GHz downlink using narrow-beam antennas. But the frequency swaths allocated for links are less than consumers can get on cable television. More bandwidth is needed.

    One might speculate that a secret optical/IR satellite network downlinked in Hawaii might be developed. The European Space Agency, not to be outdone, says they're thinking of building miniaturised optical systems that fit onto a microchip. These optical networks might use optical CDMA which encodes each pulse,across a segment of wavelengths.

  14. Re:Liability by WolfWithoutAClause · · Score: 5, Funny
    Yeah, right. Emotional trauma caused by being hit by an 18 meter beach ball moving at a few feet a minute- you'd get laughed out of court.

    "And then it popped see, and my voice went all squeaky. My friends looked at me and they all laughed. I was so ashamed. I'm asking for 90 billion dollars in damages."

    --

    -WolfWithoutAClause

    "Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"
  15. Cool Picture by WeekendKruzr · · Score: 5, Informative

    Although I hesitate due to the high liklihood of it being Slashdotted, the company's homepage has a pretty cool picture of the device in question. While the most of the comm gear is hidden within, you can see some antennae's and solar panels on the side. The rest of the site has lots of other interesting pics, but like the article is unfortunately very short of any tech detail. :-/

  16. Re: Stratosphere by TeknoHog · · Score: 4, Funny
    > > factors such as weather, acts of God

    OK, there's no weather in stratosphere, but you're closer to God ... :-/

    --
    Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  17. interesting tangent by zogger · · Score: 5, Interesting

    --I've seen several slashdot threads now on starting your own business, moaning about the company you are in, etc. The two recent were the tech trends thread and the hilarious wobbly headed CEO doll "bonus". Anyway, I found the most fascinating thing in the article was that, to the owner, balloons were just fun! That's how he got into it, doing what he thought was fun and cool! Fun can translate into enthusiasm which leads to making some radical but maybe cool decisions. More power to the guy, and hope he figures out how to keep them in place! And is this a new job title, certified stratonaut network administrator*? CSNA* What a job!

    *copylefted, have fun!

  18. Re:This won't work by thogard · · Score: 4, Informative

    thunderstorms in Oklahoma typicaly top out at 50,000ft however they have been known to go to 65,000 ft. 19km is 62kft. The jet stream is at the top of the stratosphere, right below the stratopause which tends to be at 150,000 ft. They have a long way to go to get out of the "weather".

  19. competition by anonymous+loser · · Score: 5, Informative
    There is already another project called SkyStation that has a significant business advantage IMHO. It's already been in development for several years, and is backed by some rather large corporations such as Lockheed Martin (where some of the development is taking place).

    However, given the current state of the telecom industry, I find it hard to believe that *any* of these projects will get off the ground (no pun intended) in the near future.

  20. Re:visibility by maggard · · Score: 4, Informative
    You wont be able to see them. Even the giant airships of the '3os were invisible when flying at altitude.

    As to casting a shadow the brightness of the sky (much less the sun) quickly fades out any shadow; the same as high-flying planes don't cast visible shadows (unlike low-altitude ones near airports.)

    Any environmental effects of these would be very minimal, far less then those of a conventional plane or helicopter.

    --
    I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
  21. Re:Liability by Door-opening+Fascist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You're worried about 18-meter 4-ton helium filled balloons over heavily-populated areas? We already have 80-meter 40-ton airplanes flying over heavily-populated areas, and they're filled with highly flammable jet fuel to boot.

  22. Old Hat by A+non+moose+cow · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Oil field trash from Africa's equitorial west coast might remember this being done over 20 years ago (by Conoco? I can't remember). The company needed communications into the jungle, and the anchored dirgibles solved two problems...

    1. They didn't have to cut a path for wires
    2. They could avoid the natives stealing the wire.

    The problem came in the first monsoon season when , although very heavily anchored, the coastal one was blown hard enough to snap the dirgible from the cable. The cable bounded back like a rubber band, and completely demolished the base station. Tons of thick steel cable flying out of the sky. I wish I could have seen it.

    (My dad, now retired from Mobil, told me this story some years ago.)