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."

Comments

Long range WiFi, Stationkeeping + Some more links

[StCredZero]

To make this viable, they will need Phased Array Wi-Fi as covered here earlier. This will increase their range to many miles. There is also a paper about stationkeeping for a group of such balloons.

Some more links on the story itself:

• 21st Century Airships
• Yahoo (German, Translated)
• www.telekom-presse.de (translated)

No, they'll float. It's all they need to do.

[Spamalamadingdong]

You can't make them stationary....
Let them float, they get blown around (world) by the jet streams. (Lots of surface area * 100 m/s winds).

Yes you can. The jet streams are phenomena of the troposphere. The stratosphere, where these things would float, is stratified (thus the name) and has little wind.

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.

Tie them to ground.. The tie down cable becomes an aviation hazard.

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.

Volume needed to lift ~10 pounds to 75,000 ft requires a balloon 30 to 40feet in diameter.

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.