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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?"
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
I assume this means backwards places like the Fens, Channel Islands, Welsh valleys and Liverpool. It might help to teach them what a computer and electricity are for first.
I wonder if an airship (or zeppelin) based broadband modem would be appropriately called a `z-modem`... ;)
Why don't they just use five ounce birds carrying packets inside of cocounts?
Sig- http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?ayefly
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.
...to hack into one of these babies and land it on my roof.
Typos... that's just how I role.
"Why is my net connection down?"
"The router crashed."
"Can't you reboot it or something."
"No, I mean it literally crashed. Some bird flew into it and the sucker fell from the sky. We'll be getting a replacement up in an hour or so."
It might bring a whole new meaning to "my network's gone down"
Bob
Listen to my latest album here
Gives new meaning to the term "Server Crash".
sorry officer, left my sig in my other computer.
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?
I had heard of these things before (like here, but it's the first time I see anyone talking about it seriously other than in future, vague projects and predictions.
It's like low-cost, low-tech satellite communications (less area covered, less powerful transmission units, but cheaper too), the only thing I see as a possible problem is the interference with air traffic in higher populated areas (probably the reason why they're starting with these more remote locations for implementation).
Damn cool if you ask me.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
I'm sure it will be a badge of honour in small English villages to say "Aye, I get me pr0n from tha' big tit in the sky!"
Trolling is a art,
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).
I assume microlights would be superior as you wouldn't need to tether them to prevent them from being blown away.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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!
It wont be the same. There will be a latency but it wont be anything close to that with satellite internet. Think about it. They are talking balloons at, what, and altitude of 10 miles or so? (I haven't yet read the article but for this I don't need to). Your DirectPC satellites are geosynchronous at worst...you're talking ~28,000 miles.
Let's see, speed of light traversing 20+/- miles (up and back down each way) and this being factored into latency, vs speed of light traversing 56,000+/- miles (up and back each way). See a HUGE difference there?
The latency would be/will be a nonissue.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt
An interesting overview in the use of avian carriers for packet transport. Seems to follow with your point nicely though I'm concerned of packet loss due to falcon hacking.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
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.
Q. Weather problems and air traffic?
A. It's 12 miles up. that's well above commercial air traffic, and i suspect (although i'm too lazy to check) most weather problems.
Q. Latency TImes?
A. According to the article, those will be a hell of a lot lower than satellite. Also, it seems to be boasting a very, very high rate of transfer.
Q. How many are needed for redundancy?
A. Well, none. If it crashes it does. Kind of like how, if your ISP gets blowed up, you ain't got no internet. This isn't yet considered stable enough for long term solutions. it's mainly just cheap braodband for areas that don't have it, until they get it - if that makes sense. I see more military applications than anything, to be perfectly honest.
** Chigusaaa!!! You're the coolest girl in the WORLD!!! **
Must... choose.... better.... search terms. I found this reference, from 1997, about something then called SkyStation:
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http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,604
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
How big are these airships?
It is appropriate that the source of one's internet might also block out the sun for short periods of time, thus rendering it safe for geeks to venture outside.
"Natural light! Get it off!"
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
http://www.york.ac.uk/admin/presspr/pressreleases/ broadbandhaps.htm
Heh, this made Slashdot. Cool. So, yeah. I know these guys.
Basically, the airships is question are built by a company named Aerovironment (www.aerovironment.com). I've known about them for a while; one of my good friends works for the company. Really cool stuff; the basic idea is that this giant fixed wing circles around a rural area in the mid-to-upper atmosphere (where the air is thin enough to reduce drag, but thick enough to support lift) using solar power during the day and battery power at night. Then you drop some cell / wireless data relays on the bottom of the plane (UAV, to be more accurate), and poof: Regional visibility of a satellite relay, without the lag of communicating with a device being 22,500 miles away in geosynchronous orbit. That it's much cheaper to deploy the device (and possible to recover it as needed) is just gravy.
Things haven't been trivial for Aerovironment -- they lost one of their fixed wings some time ago during a test flight in Hawaii -- but as far as I know, they're the leaders in developing UAV's that simply don't need to land.
--Dan
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!
I can't read the university or manufacturer pages at the moment (slashdotted), only the guardian article. But I would expect that only the test baloon over York will be tethered, and that will be at a fairly low altitude (York doesn't have a major airport). The stratospheric baloons will almost certainly not be tethered, because of the weight of 12 miles of cable strong enough to hold them and itself. More likely they will use engines (solar powered electric, for example, so as not to carry fuel) to hold position.
OK, having read the article, I was too simplistic, but not enough to change the argument. The airship operates at ~12 miles and covers a 40 mile circle. If it has a ground station directly below it (roughly speaking), then if you are on the edge of that 40 mile coverage, the max range your wireless signal would need to traverse is ~42 miles each way. So a two-way comm would traverse ~84 miles. This is still MUCH less than the ~112,000 mile range a two-way comm signal must traverse via satellite internet (28,000 mile high geostationary orbit, 56,000+ mile signal range up and down, then the return signal).
Still - no real latency issue.
hhIn Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Gyromills would make a better platform and they would generate electricity at the same time.
It's not "York University". York University is in Canada. The department in question is part of "The University of York".
Might seem petty, but it's a bit like calling MIT the Technology Institute of Massachusetts.
This gives the term,"My ISP has crashed" new meaning.
Pretty Pictures!
Why do we need these things when the money could be used to lay cable ?
Dunno about you, but I would love competing services (and thus presumably lower prices) for broadband, or even to have redundancy in my connection. Cable costs me an arm and a leg at the moment, and is my only choice. There could be multiple airship-based providers as well as DSL and cable.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Wind/storms/other aircraft: Flies at 10 miles, far above storms and other aircraft.
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What about the tether: 10 miles of rope, are you taking the piss?
Weight: It's carrying capacity increases with the cube of it's size, the bigger the better.
Power: Solar panels on top increase with the surface area. Batteries for holding position at night. Power increases with the square of the size, lifting capacity increases with the cube of the size, the bigger the better.
Latency: 6x10^-8 seconds for the radio wave to travel.
The Japanese have been testing them for a while now:
http://www.jinjapan.org/trends98/honbun/ntj9803
http://www.nal.go.jp/eng/newsletter/99winte
Less likely:
http://www.worldskycat.com/markets/skyco
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
How many places are "out of reach of broadband"? As opposed to "not profitable enough to enable broadband for"?
Most places have landlines. Ok, I know there are some really remote locations that do not -- like Cwm Brefi. Isn't it just a question of upgrading the existing telephone exchanges to increase coverage? No new wires, right?
I don't much care whether my broadband comes via cable, DSL, or wireless. This airship idea sounds great but it's years off. I think I'm going to go door to door trying to reach our DSL trigger level (35 signed up, need 100 -- damn old people!).
"The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)