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UK Testing Wireless Broadband Via Airship
fruey writes "A team from York University, UK are about to test high altitude platforms, according to this article, as a way of bringing high-speed internet services to computer users in remote areas out of reach of broadband. They plan to use solar powered engines to keep the aerial platforms in position. The Capanina site have some more information about this stratospheric broadband experiment. More technical stuff can be found at the York University website
This technology could deliver broadband communications at data rates up to 120Mbit/s! Screw cable and xDSL, when will stratospheric be available near me?"
Satellites always had terrible lag times for transmission, so this would be much better...but c'mon, the British weather sucks--how long before these little "microlight" planes get knocked out of the sky by wind, attacked by birds, or grounded due to foul weather? Just put money into running coax/POTS or long-distance 802.11-type service.
It would be called the Sun phone. What they'd do is launch a big balloon and have it hover over your large metropolitan areas. The phone gives you seemless voice capabiities, and then you plug it into your computer and you've got hi-speed access. And then the really cool feature... the thing lights up, just like the real Sun (only this Sun would be visible at night.)
Yeah, it's just a marketing gimmick I guess, but it seemed like such a good fit. And besides, what else is Sun going to do? Manufacture over-priced blade servers?
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Nasa's project Helios (the unmanned solar-powered "flying wing") has had a similar Idea behind it:
Why clutter geostationary orbit when you can have unmanned planes circling metropolitian areas? Using solar power, these flying relays could operate nearly indefinitely at a fraction of the price.
The biggest problem that remains: What to do at night, when there is no sun powering the Solar Cells? Helios used Fuel Cells for backup power, but the technology is not yet advanced enough to sustain flight for longer than ~1 week.
I wonder how the latency and ping time would be.
Having used Hughes' DirecDuo / DirecPC 4 years ago before broadband was available at my home, it left the broadband experience wanting.
It was ok for downloading large files, couldn't do online gaming at all, and surfing the web was just ok - you could feel the few seconds where you sent the URL over, but once it got it sent the browser downloaded it quickly enough.
I guess it would depend how their NOC worked - but I still have to imagine this is only good for the same things as DirecPC (which means gaming is still out probably).
services from Astra and Eutelsat and others already cover every bit of land from Iceland to Pakistan... at small prices. Try www.eutelsat.net to get some really low prices!! Just a dish, dvb modem, et voila'! Great stuff!
Sure its fast, but if its stratospheric, its usefulness may be greatly effected by inclimate weather. Even cumulus clouds can greatly lower the bandwidth of wireless communication when transmitting between the stratosphere and the ground. It will be interesting to see how they deal with this issue.
This speed figure seemed to be just thrown out of a hat, with nothing to back it up. (It's also referenced on this CAPANINA project page, but again no more details.
These are going to be 10 miles up, it's only the experiments that are with tethered airships. The tests will be followed by slightly different style aircraft which will be less affected by weather systems significantly below them. Birds don't fly to those sorts of altitudes either.
Serviceable area will be less than for geostationary orbit satellites, but lower power and higher speeds are possible. The telecoms requirements of this century will probably require a lot of deployment of new stuff, because there's only so much sense in deploying fibre optics all over the place, because the remote areas will get left out.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
This is just great. Now we have to wait for two emerging technologies to mature: wireless broadband AND autonomous blimps. Not to mention the integration and ground control thereof. It's not like they're not having a hard enough time deploying wireless broadband from the top of a steel pole on a hill--pretty reliable and established mounting technology in most parts of the world--now they have to do it from a floating platform that has been pie-in-the-sky (pardon the pun) for decades. Yeah, it will happen Really Soon Now!