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Wi-Fi From The Sky
Makarand writes "Some companies think that the answer to providing ubiquitous
broadband access is to have telecom gear float high in the sky.
High-tech blimps, called Stratellites, could be used by ISPs to carry
their telecom equipment as high as 13 miles, far above commercial
air traffic and turbulent weather
according to this article on
ABC News. At this height the Stratellite
could serve an area of around 300,000 sq miles. Subscribers will
merely need to put a small antenna outside and get broadband.
The Stratellites will be perfect spheres and carry all electronic
equipment within the Kevlar fabric and will not have any external
fins or gondolas attached. Companies are already developing
Wi-Fi sytems that could operate over tens of miles and these
systems could be used on these Stratellites."
do I have to say it. Use birds.
sig
Does that mean I'll be able to get an 802.11b signal in a plane? That would pretty much eradicate the problems of installing internet gear in each plane - just put a little antenna up to the window and boom, you're surfin'.
What's your damage, Heather?
A lot of people will now be able to listen to free music anywhere, via internet radio.
:)
There goes the RIAA. Also, this could cause us to lose our hearing of the sounds usually omitted from the tracks during MP3 encoding.
And what about radio waves everywhere? And people instant messsaging each other non-stop?
I know it's kind of scary and weird, but this future could all be possible in under five years. And once we get to wi-fi everywhere, there's no going back! And hackers will be able to DOS my toaster.
I for one, hope this development takes time
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Okay, so you cant use WiFi on a commercial flight because it has a possibility of jamming the aircraft's comms and tracking. Wonder what, if anything, will be the consequence of flying through medium-high (it has to have a bit of juice to reach 13 miles through clouds and whatnot, right?) intensity WiFi transmissions?
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
I would have thought there is some air movement up there, and it actaully has to get through the turbulent layer in the first place, so I presume it has some means of propulsion for station keeping....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Texas is about 268,000 sq mi.
Cables are a little hard to drag around with you for communications on the go. I wonder about the large "footprint" that the balloons will have - won't having everyone in range communicating through it tend to chew up the bandwidth? (I guess I could read the article.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Forbes talked about their list of 85 world-changing ideas.
:) Why? Because Wi-Fi will do to cell phones what cable/dsl did to land-line dial-up. Man I was just imagining all levels of students using wi-fi tablets in school and that's kind of messed up....
Wi-Fi is coming up, and that will be the biggest world-changing things ever in the future. Imagine always being connected to everybody else in the world who you'd want to be connected to. How screwed up is that?
Oh wait. Cell phones can do that. Damn. Oh well, it doesn't mean I'm going to let this post go waste!
!
Cover your eyes and click this link!
It could be a decent solution to the last mile problem but...
:). In that case, 4 or 5 competing Wifi-from-the-sky balloons (remember, each one has upto a 300,000 square mile range) could well make it impossible to setup a personal wireless LAN on the ground.
[ From the article: ]
The other advantage of Sanswire's setup, says Molen, is that Stratellites will use a wireless connection scheme known as 802.11 or "WiFi."
I'm guessing the "advantage" is that they don't intend paying license fees for the 2.4GHz spectrum
It's a good idea -- as long as they use their own (rented) portion of the spectrum, and leave the 2.4 GHz commons to us commoners.
ATG came up with a similar idea some time ago - doesn't look like they've got as far as a prototype yet tho - their design is a more usual blimp shape rather than spherical mind ...
...
ATG
Personally, I'd love one of their large Skycat's - imagine a beo.. I mean it'd make a great house
How many 802.11b freqs are there? How ever many there are that's how many users one balloon is limited to supporting.
and after several years of intense 'Wi-fi from the Sky' use, studies start to appear that tell us there is an increased chance of Cancer in the 'Wi-fi from the sky' hot spot areas. And just like with cellphones another study denies that fact. And everyone will still wonder how risky it really is...
In the irony dept, Newmarket is north of Toronto, up Highway .. 404.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
On weekends, I live in the mountains. Mountain villages with their 80, 100, sometimes 200 inhabitants aren't interesting for telcos, so the only possible Net connection around here is 56k (at 35 kbps because of bad line quality). Additionally, this costs about EUR 2/hour during the day and EUR 0.5/hour at night because local calls are still pretty expensive around here.
Even if these blimps can only give each subscriber 64k (at a flat rate), that'd already be unbeatable in this area.
Note how it's made out of Kevlar? What else is made from Kevlar? Bullet proof vests!
The kind used in bullet proof vests used by the secret government's storm troopers!
The kind used in bullet proof vests worn by the secret government's storm troopers which protect their mind control equipment!
The kind used in bullet proof vests worn by the secret government's storm troopers which protect their mind control equipment as it floats 13 miles above the earth!
The kind used in bullet proof vests worn by the secret government's storm troopers which protect their mind control equipment as it floats 13 miles above the earth beaming their mind control rays into you!
/me adds another layer of tinfoil to his hat.
Trolling is a art,
Read the RFC and they have one with QoS as well
-jon
The Area of the uk is about 244,000km. This is small compared to the radius that this sphrere in the sky could serve!
Considering BT's reluctance to ugrade rural exchanges for ADSL broadband (including mine, I have to get my broadband from Telewest), this could kick start true broadband Britain.
Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
DOH!It could even DOUBLE our download capacity. So that we'll be able to read all the dupes on /..
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Lets try to keep the math simple
300,000 sq miles, in a circle would be a radius of rougly 300 miles. With the unit 10 miles in in the air the distance between end point and blimp would be a bit over 300 miles. I don't know of any WiFi that has that kinda range. So you can get a 10 mile antanea on a blimp 10 miles in the air and reach a house directly under the blimp. WOOHOO hurray for progress.
Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
Finally an ISP with BIG BALLS!
I think they should teather them with all the cat 5 I bought to wire my house some years back.
Oh yeah and
imagine a beowolf......
Wi-Fi in the sky
I can fly twice as high
Take a peek
You uber-geek
A Wi-Fi rainbow
[NO CARRIER]
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If you look on the web site of the manufacturer you can find this picture where it is clear that those things on the side of the sphere are combination propeller/stearing vane modules.
:)
BTW does anyone else think that the picture on their front page makes the thing look like the Death Star (tm)
-jon
do these airships have controls to land them - in the case of a hardware upgrade, or do they just remain another piece of atmospheric garbage floating around?
I predict it will never happen.
-
The last time Slash dot covered this I posted a link to the air ship list (I have some weird friends) I got this response
6 &mode=flat&tid=126&threshold
I don't know if you were watching the list a couple weeks ago when a related
press release came up.
If you weren't--I said it was kind of neat and supplied a link to the
Sanswire site so people could see pictures and read the data. A number of
people thought it was a hyped lie, because 1) they've seen this hype and
others before and 2) Sanswire claimed the hull is made of Kevlar. Kevlar
(like all aramids) has problems being formed into any kind of cloth suitable
for holding lift gas--see the experts for what they are, has to due with
brittleness or something. If the problem were solved, it would be a big deal
and the company that did it could do more than just launch a com craft.
I've inquired with the company about what they are selling--can I buy an
account at what price. I figured that puts them on the spot to give answers.
All this was before Dec 11, the test date in Arizona. You see that post
toward the end, by the guy who said he saw it there in AZ and heard someone
claim it blew away?
Of course it could be that it did go on an unscheduled flight but was
brought down eventually. Or that could be pure embroidery.
But Sanswire is less visible on the net. The "Stratellite" page is being
reconstructed. As it might be after a successful test--or as it might be
forever, after an unsuccessful one.
I wrote the CEO, sounding nervous. We'll see what his flunkies say.
Have you heard any more about it?
The basic idea is perfectly great. Maybe not with a Kevlar hull, but if that
wasn't a lie then they did make it fly after all. Well somebody's got to
make the breakthrough someday.
I thought all those Venetian blind things by the props were the solar panels
but I went to the manufacturer's site and they were featured on other craft
that weren't supposed to be solar powered. Maybe they are the radiators for
the engines?
As nobody at slashdot pointed out clearly, winds at high altitude may be
fast but because the air is thin a strong enough engine on a
well-streamlined enough hull can hope to overcome them. It would be about
two scale heights, a seventh or so surface density--Roughly, take whatever
speed the wind is blowing at 20 km up and divide it by three to get an idea
of the equivalent sea level wind.
> From: Christopher Blood
> Reply-To: chris@sonictrout.com
> Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2002 21:40:23 -0500
> To: airship-list@lists.colorado.edu
> Subject: Slashdot | Airships Tested As Two-Way Telecom Beacons
>
> Thought this was of interest. It's a good idea.
> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/17/00120
> =1
> d=1>
>
>
.
An article from the Toronto Sun, and an article from a News for Nerds site
Such a concept might be good for the average user who only surfs and does email and the occasional download, but this would absolutely totally suck for online gamers. If memory serves me right, latency for satellite net access is something like 100ms per kilometer. at 13 miles (roughly 20 kilometers), you'd be looking at 2000 ms minimum just to reach the device, and at least 2000ms from the device to the server. No thanks....
It's better to burn out than to fade away
Some more links on the story itself:
Will these balloons be placed all over the world? I can understand certain parts like the U.S., Europe, etc. But one over North Korea? Not likely. Who will be in charge of deciding which places get to access this?
Has anyone thought of the maintenance cost related to this idea? Troubleshooting? How reliable is your ISP now? And we're talking about putting new technology in a ball floating thousands of feet in the air like it'll float for years without failing. This is just another fancy solution to a simple problem. High on the "cool" effect, low of sensibility. Broadband to the home has already been solved. There are multiple solutions. There just is not enough end-user interest to make it cost beneficial to the providers to roll out. A combination of cable, dsl, and ground-based wireless will provide 95% of broadband access to the home for the next decade. The only other player is satellite broadband, which has not won out over any of the other three in any market.
If you would like to be a leader with a large following...drive slowly down a windy two-lane road
Helium is an inert gas. It doesn't burn, nor does it support combustion. Hydrogen fell out of favor as a balloon filling very quickly after the Hindenburg disaster.
Other than initial outlay, for most purposes, the satellite solution still seems the most viable to me.
Of course lag times are a bitch when you're playing Quake or IL2. This is a real issue to me and others, but totally irrelevant to the average net user.
Maybe 'neutrino radio' zapped directly through the earth?
KFG
speed of light (in free space) 186,000 mps
13 m/186,000mps = 69 MICROseconds
-jon
Skystation
Doing a bit of math.
300,000 is the total sq. miles or the result of
pi*r^2 (since the area covered must be circular in nature)
so, r^2 = approx 100,000
r = approx 316 miles.
THIS SEEMS LIKE A LARGE DISTANCE TO COVER.
(I am already warming up from the flames to come on the previous statement already)
Also - I don't like the idea of having these things floating over our heads to be blown up by enemies of the state at any moment. We will begin to rely on this wireless network and it is ultimately almost completely defenseless, plus no reentry to burn them up before they crash into the ground destroying a home or two. I realize I am being a bit pessimistic here, but I think this is just asking for trouble. Besides, how will they be powered?
our buddies the lawyers won't ever let this get off the ground. they will sue sue sue if one of these balloons falls from the sky (insurance policies will be higher near higher density population areas), and you can be sure some one will sue because they are "scared" just knowing the balloon is overhead..heck i can see a class action suit ("Thousands scared by balloon overhead, and out of sight!)
You can't make them stationary..
Tie them to ground.. The tie down cable becomes an aviation hazard.
Thirteen (13) mile long cables of any strength are somewhat heavy.
Volume needed to lift ~10 pounds to 75,000 ft requires a balloon 30 to 40feet in diameter.
Let them float, they get blown around (world) by the jet streams. (Lots of surface area * 100 m/s winds).
Tendency to come down in unwanted places (Insurance companies nightmare).
(I.E. High tension power lines, Expressways, Planes in flight, Tall buildings, etc.)
Try to make them stationary under own power. Not!!
Bigger == More surface area to catch wind == More engine/more weight == Never going to happen!!
Well, if this company is real, I assume THEY have thought about maintenance. Right? As for the rest of your post, didn't you watch the Bush-Gore election? You seem to forget our country is divided into red and blue areas. The blue areas (democratic, urban) mostly get high speed internet. The red areas (rural, republican) mostly don't, via DSL, Cable, or ground based wireless.
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
Huh?
300,000 square miles? That covers the earths surface 10 times over (earth circ is only 23,627 miles)... and if the equip was facing towards the moon, it could service it as well. Moon = 238,900 away.
May have some security issues here.
happy Saturday (at work).
Hmmm IE users might want to stay clear of that link... Not that I favour IE or anything, but posters like that should get banned. (The link _might_ cause your computer to shit it self)
You assume. And they may have, which would be why the product will never make it to market. What politics has to do with this I have no idea. You're rural=republican statement is false, which I can testify to by being born in a county with only 3 towns (only 1 of which is large enough for a stoplight!) and less republicans (not actually, but its funny). They don't have DSL, Cable, or ground based wireless because there's no money in it! And you think some company is going to profit from floating a multi-million dollar wireless network that is impossible to support over sparsely populated rural areas consisting of people who, for the most part, don't even own computers? They'd fall flat within the a week of the announcement...
If you would like to be a leader with a large following...drive slowly down a windy two-lane road
the only thing that comes from the skies are V1-rockets from NAZI GERMANY
I have a solution. We can simply erect buildings with huge antennae to service our wifi needs, then move 68,000 ft underground into a large network of tunnels........
-\|/-\|/- If its not 1200 baud, its crap....
Your Logic is Flawed. Hydrogen in the Fuel Cells of the hindinberg was not teh cause of it burning. The "skin" of the ballon was fabric soaked with varnish and sealants. When dry they are extreamly flamable. Besides the Hydrogen would have blown the thing up if it was the true cause.
The Toronto Star is a conservative newspaper The Toronto Sun is a psuedo-tabloid Parent refers to the Toronto Star
"Gives a whole new meaning to server crash."
Wakka Wakka Wakka!
You forgot that the air is full of radio signals. The signal coming out of your cell phone is no different than the signal coming out of your local FM radio station, except the radio station's signal is thousands of times more powerful. And guess what? Aircraft pass through thousands of powerful radio signals while in flight, and it does not cause them to go crashing into the ground. Your cell phone has no chance of bringing down an aircraft, sorry!
Another broadband dream for rural users. I've been waiting for high speed for years, after many other ideas like this. Our area has got a wireless tower, yet it is very expensive and targeted at only businesses. I can drive for 10 minutes to town which has cable/dsl connections, yet the rest of us are dialup. My connection is actually 28.8 due to Bell's laziness and poor phone lines.
Dont even mention satellite internet......
see http://aerovironment.com
Instead of a blimp, being blown around by the wind, it uses an airplane that's controlled.
- David
Offtopic, but true :)
retraction? :)
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
K.W. Jeter described a spherical balloon relay called Small Moon
in his novel Farewell Horizontal.
Most of the novel's action takes place on the outer face of a miles-high cylinder.
The curvature of the cylinder made Small Moon a virtual necessity.
-kgj
You think this is a real proposal, or just a trial balloon?
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
But the real problem is distributing these baloons all over the world. The station keeping paper refrenced above cites average windspeed of 30 meters a second.
wouldn't it suck if the jet stream shifted a little and ten baloons would be over San Antonio with none over chicago.
Basically without throwing tens of hundreds of these up on a daily basis. (can you imagine the people running around to launch hteese things in predicted spots when an outage is forecast?)
I'm hot into the idea of looking at the weather to determine my connection speed.
htese might be cheaper than powered solutions, perhaps they could work in concert.
pending committee review
The Japanese Government has a similar project, and it's further along. They want to go up to 60,000 feet. At higher altitudes, there's less wind pressure to fight while stationkeeping.
We think it went down somewhere in the Atchafalaya swamp. We've sent a team of CCNAs out in Boudreauxs swamp boat to do a reboot/relauch.
Think about it - what do billboards have?
They're positioned near large populations. They're up high for maximum line of sight (the old fashioned visible light kind). They have lots of power to run those lights at night.
I'm waiting for some WISP to get together with a billboard vendor and mount antennas on those things.
The billboard vendors will cream their pants when they realize that people will actually WANT to look for the bloody things, in order to locate one that's providing service. "What, you mean we can put this thing on here, and people will actively seek out our locations?"
Until you have to replace it of course. The ballons are going to be relatively expensive to maintain in manpower. The chief advantage of the balloons is the distribution of costs over time, carriers and geography. You don't need a single source to finance them and you can put them up piecemeal as you go along.
The satellites cover the whole earth at one go. The ballons will *never* cover the whole earth. This will be very important for some, albeit a minority.
You're right, for VoIP the lag will be, at the very least, annoying. Video conferencing is really VoIP with pictures as far as that goes. The lag in surfing isn't so bad, and in streaming video from a nonlive source is nearly unnoticable. For any download activity, in fact, you only notice it for the first second. That's all.
Of course we're still waiting for real VoIP. I'm not holding my breath either. There are too many vested interests for whom that would be "A Bad Thing (tm)." The *only* advantage for the *user* that VoIP has is the potential savings in cost. If the vested interests can keep the cost high, well, there ya go.
Ashcroft is doing his level best to keep the idea unattractive as well.
KFG
Who is the idiot that thought up the term WiFi?!?
Makes it sound like wireless stereo gear.
I'll bet it was that Ralsky bastard! Let's sign him up for more stuff! To the Lists!
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Phase array antennas may solve some of the problems, but a problem I see with WiFi or any other wireless tech that uses a contention based modulation scheme, is that the collision domain becomes so large with such great line of sight. The article claims they will be using WiFi gear, and at 13 miles, would be service 300,000 square miles of area. Assuming a best case scenario, what do you think the throughput is going to be like for a few thousand subscribers sharing a, nominally, 11Mbps link? =)
Router crash kills 8, film at 11.
But I'll note that the interview in question was with the person with a vested interest in this technology. There was no "counterpoint" from the other side. I also note he didn't say it only took one person to bring it down, make repairs or changes, and send it back up again. He said it only took one person to "handle it on the ground." Quite a different statement. It only requires one *ground crew,* not one *person* in the facility. Count on half a dozen at least in real life. The communictions package is *2000 Kg. worth of gear.* One guy isn't going to handle that, nor is the ground crew going to be the technical staff that maintains it. If nothing else someone is going to have to clean the toilet and shovel the walk. The balloon guy isn't going to do everything.
I'm not against this idea at all. I love airships and balloons. In fact, I'm the guy that submited the last Slashdot story on Zeppelins and can't wait to see them cruising the skys again, or get a chance to ride in one.
I simply believe that the whole endeavor is going to be far more problematic, and expensive, than this guy making publicity forcasts about his own comapany is projecting.
I'll also, in journalistic fairness, state that my own bias is that on land I'm perfectly happy with the wired system I already have and from wireless I'm more interested in having coverage *outside* the scope of these balloons.
Like the middle of the Atlantic.
KFG
The "blimps" seem to have some advantages but if you look at the history of some technologies the first to "do it" seems to be more important then having the best answer. aerovironment has lots of other excellent products too, so they have a track record of success and they already have contracts with the military and large telecom companies, so they have a foot in the door too.
"The Pathfinder-Plus 121-foot wingspan, solar-powered aircraft, is a smaller version of AeroVironment's 247-foot wingspan Helios aircraft which, during NASA testing in Hawaii last summer, shattered the world altitude record for non-rocket powered aircraft by flying to 96,863 feet - well above the 60,000 to 70,000 feet targeted for commercial telecom services. As part of the NASA development program, multi-day flight capability will be demonstrated next year with the Helios solar/electric airplane using the world's first fuel cell based aircraft energy system that enables the aircraft to operate through the night "
checkout:
http://skytowerglobal.com/begin.html
and parent company:
http://www.aerovironment.com/news/news-
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
As if things like the ISS and Iridium flares weren't enough. "Look, another exposure ruined! Whoopee!"
not enough... do the math
Strattelites are supposed to be 7.5 to 13 miles in the sky with a range of 5-10 miles (all the different press releases aren't so clear)... or about (root sum of the squares) 9-18 miles from the strat to the most distant point.
phased-array only gets you 9 __KM__, or under 7 miles
That, plus Sanswire has a bad reputation to overcome.
The interference from a WiFi-equipped laptop one foot away from a signal cable passing through the plane is millions of times stronger than a stratospheric communication platform hovering a several miles above it.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The hydrogen didn't burn initially as without oxgen available inside the envelope it pysically couldn't.
:) )
You're correct to say that the envelope skin with its volatile sealants burned first, tearing the envelope allowing oxygen from the outside air to mix with the hydrogen and burn.
The hydrogen would have burned-off very quickly leaving the remained of the envelope to burn more fiercely.
In any case the major reason for not using hydrogen in LTAs now is the dangers involved in general handling ie: when you fill the things there is a massive risk of leakages and fires.
(As told to me by my good friend from the Virgin airship company U.K.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Directional antenna arrays lets you re-use frequencies efficiently. Since the platform is more-or-less equally distant from all ground terminals it solves the near-far problem and allows the use of arrays with relatively weak side-lobe attenuation.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Wi-Fi only has a few channels. These balloons, at high altitude, are going to be in range of literally tens of thousands of wi-fi emitters, not to mention 2.4GHz (and presumably 5GHz) cordless phones. Microwave ovens also operate on this spectrum - how many little leaks will there be. Remember, this is on Part-15 spectrum (at least in the US) where *anyone* can set up as many transmitters as they want!
Even with steerable phased array antennas, the interference problem seems insurmountable in urban areas. You would need a WHOLE LOT of great big antennas (many meters - don't have time to do the detailed calcs) and even then many areas are unlikely to work.
Either something is being left unsaid, or.. I smell a possible scam.
Does anyone have information that would contradict this interference argument?
The only good weather is bad weather.
The key to ubiquitous access, as demonstrated by Slashdot, is redundancy.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
There was another company looking to piggy-back on the National Weather Service's twice-daily balloon sounding probes to provide cellular service in unserved areas. The latex balloons climb to extreme altitudes, and then often hang for 24 hours or more without moving much (according to the article) before bursting. If the relay balloons float at similar altitudes, they would require little power for stationkeeping.
Big deal, you bar air traffic from the area. We may soon be doing the same to generate electricity, with tethers perhaps 3 miles long; check out gyromills for a jolt to your weltanschauüng. Have you looked at the balloons used to loft cosmic-ray, infrared and the cosmic-background radiation experiments lately? Boomerang flew at 120,000 feet, thus requiring a balloon several times the volume required to loft a payload to a mere 65,000 feet. There is a lot of established expertise, and while this can't be considered a trivial exercise it isn't going to require much new work.Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
The collision domain is both temporal and angular. If the system has a single, omnidirectional antenna, your criticism is dead on-target; however, only fools would think about trying to do that, as even cellular towers are far more sophisticated. What the balloon would likely have is either a microwave lens antenna (or a large array of them) built into the balloon (you can make something with a very high refractive index at microwave frequences using a bit of aluminum foil in a very light plastic foam) or a completely synthetic aperture phased-array antenna. The former is probably heavier, the latter requires lots of DSPs - but if Iridium sats can do it, a balloon probably can. What the antennas do for you is to allow two transmitters separated by a sufficient angle to be heard separately and distinctly even if they are transmitting simultaneously; they do not collide any more than the images of two stars shining simultaneously have to collide on an astrophotograph unless they are very close together in angle.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
This does suggest a nasty way to DoS an entire cellphone network. I hope nobody thinks of it... oops, too late!
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
I live in the middle of nowhere, nebraska, and still can't get broadband. Sure, there's satellite, but I've heard more bad things than good.
Anyway, I think blimps would be a benefit literally everywhere.
Heheh... for the confused: Hacking with a Pringles tube
Random is the New Order.
Since they are supposed to be pretty much autonomous I recon you could handle all or at least several of them at once. Probably you'd have a couple of bases around the US for instance and let them maintain 3-4. And have one or so as a "hot backup" and use for replacement.
;-)
But yeah, of course it's stupid to trust the guys behind the project right out. Naturally they're biased. But I do think that satellites are a bit too expensive for the purpose. Irridium would seem to provide good support for that theory at any rate. And there was another similar project called
Skystation going as well. That one has backing from Lockheed Martin. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more projects in the same genre.
And regarding the middle of the Atlantic I think what is really needed is better interoperability between systems. So when you're at home or in a city you use a very high speed link. The more rural areas you go to the lower speeds you get. But you should still be able to have one box that does it all. (Although it might need several different technologies implemented.)
But yeah, fast wireless on a remote island would be neat. I'd rather have it out in a park nearby though.
That would be so cool!!! Having ISPs giving out Wi-Fi access straight from balloons. That's great! If it comes to Canada, I want a Wi-Fi card!!!
Then why doesnt anyone sue the air lines for having tubes of metal a few hundred feet long? Filled with jet fuel fly over head when they are known to crash every once in a while or even be hijacked and crashed into highly populated areas? Not only that - what are the chances it would actually hit someone/something over an air plane being that air planes fly to populated areas, ya know where the people are?
Sanswire
'Nuff said.
check out this patent for advanced wireless technology
And there's more where that came from.
He thought of Musashi, the Sword Saint, standing in his garden more than
three hundred years ago. "What is the 'Body of a rock'?" he was asked.
In answer, Musashi summoned a pupil of his and bid him kill himself by
slashing his abdomen with a knife. Just as the pupil was about to comply,
the Master stayed his hand, saying, "That is the 'Body of a rock'."
-- Eric Van Lustbader
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