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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?"
i wonder if pornography on the internet is called "xxx". kind of like xxx rated pornography
Very interesting option.
Will they sell advertising painted on the sides of the airships?
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
What alititude would you have to park the airship? On a tether no less. If it's anything under 50,000 feet it's going to be an air hazard and subject to weather, as would anything tethered to the ground. Plus it's going to have to deal with the jet stream. Otherwise you have to reel it in every time a thunder storm blows through. Doesn't sound very reliable.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
This particular topic came up at least twice in the past and was proving to be not worth the time/effort.
Someone else can do the legwork to find the articles.
I can see one big problem with this. Since the cells you are providing are so large everyone in that cell is sharing the bandwidth. A typical mobile phone mast only servers a few thousand people and provides each one with 9.6kbps (on GSM, more on 3G). Now if this thing supplies 120 megabits to say 3 million people (e.g. the whole of Wales, South West England or The Scottish Highlands) thats only 40bps per person or about the speed of a dial up connection which is pretty much universally available in the uk although perhaps not in developing countries. In order for this to provide "broadband" its going to need more like 1gigabit per second+. Exactly the same problem occurs using satellites for net access, you can't have very many high bandwidth customers before all the bandwidth is gone.
I still think this is a great idea and could work really well for providing TV, radio, telephony and low bandwidth data services. But its gonna need to be a lot faster to give anything approaching ADSL.
How about doing it on a smaller scale?
Have tethered baloons instead of mobile phone antennas but with approximatley the same number as we already have. Cheaper than building masts, easier and quicker to build, easier to overcome geographic limiations.