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Broadband Blimps
mcabiling writes "SansWire Networks will demonstrate their "Stratellite" technology next week. For those of you who aren't familiar with SansWire, they plan to build a wireless network with balloons or "airships" as they call them.
"A Stratellite(TM) is a high-altitude airship that when in place in the stratosphere will provide a stationary platform for transmitting various types of wireless communications services currently transmitted from cell towers and satellites. It is not a balloon or a blimp. It is a high-altitude airship."
Looks like a blimp to me..."
Something a couple of friends and I talked about ages ago was flying an ordinary wifi AP from an advertising balloon. Y'see, the longest run of CAT5 you can use is 300 feet. By coincidence, the highest you can fly a tethered balloon to (neglecting ATS zones) is... 300 feet.
I don't think they're going to replace ground-based cables anytime soon, but they present some neat possibilities for replacing things we currently do with towers and satellites. They say that one of these platforms can have line-of-sight to an area the size of Texas. That could do amazing things for cellular phone and wireless Internet coverage.
Similar in concept but targeted at a different market. Their 'technology' link has some good info.
Techsphere
I actually mentioned a similar idea a few days ago on Slashdot.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
They could over come this with the old satellite/phone combination. Uploads are started through the phone connection while downloads are largely controlled through the satellite. Tiny up-pipe and huge down-pipe.
(Obviously I am making this way too simple...)
Such a plan would not be ideal... but would be better than phone alone.
Likely the better solution is a combination which also utilizes current cellular providers. If you do not get permission to place a tower somewhere, you use one of these systems to bounce signals onto another tower.
These beasts are going to work much better for bouncing strong signals to far distances... than the little weak signals that PDAs and notebooks generate.
Considering the immense air traffic over most parts of the modern world, I figured this idea might actually work, and would require basically zero investment beyond the cost of the roaming access points -- no need to invent crazy new technology when there are already perfectly good airplanes up in the air every day anyway. I figured the airlines could be paid a reasonable royalty from the fees collected from users of the network.
Well, you partially answered it. People hear the word "hydrogen" and lose control of their bowels.
Second, and more seriously an envelope capable of containing hydrogen for long mission profiles has yet to be invented. Keeping He is difficult, but doable.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
" Held in position by 6 onboard GPS units connected to the ship's engines"
WTF? 6 onboard GPS receivers? What's wrong with one good one. Surely a =10m precision is enough, and if it isn't they could try a differential GPS setup with two receivers, but six?!
"A new life awaits you in the Off-World colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure. New climate, recreational facilities.....absolutely free. Use your new friend as a personal body servant or a tireless field hand--the custom tailored genetically engineered humanoid replicant designed especially for your needs. So come on America, let's put our team up there...."
"This annoucement is brought to you by the Shimato Dominguez" Corporation - helping America into the New World."
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Geosynchronus orbit means that the satellite orbits the Earth once every 24 hours, so that it stays stationary with respect to the Earth's surface. Lower orbits have a much shorter period, meaning that to maintain continuous coverage over a fixed point you need a whole bunch of sattelites. Also, because the orbit is so much lower, LEO satellites tend to have faster rates of orbital decay, so they don't stay up as long as satellites in GEO.
LEO satellite constellations have very small but measurable latencies (a few ms)-- GPS is based on this. However, the latency is no worst than a terrestial link of the same distance. Latency is a very big issue for GEO satellites -- round trip time is at least 250ms.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
First: This will not be an amateur venture and, as such, will not be treated as one.
Second: This will be at an incredibly high altitude, and is likely not subject to many of the flight restrictions in place. No-fly zones have ceilings associated with them; many satelites fly over no-fly zones legally because they are so far up.
And they claim to have "duel envelopes". Do they walk ten paces, then turn and fire?
Besides their bad spelling, they don't address some other problems. Like just because the airship is at a height of 13 miles, doesn't mean that's how far it is from your cellphone. That's how far it is from the nearest point on earth. What about the distance to the edge of the coverage area?
Also, won't this technology force far more people's data into the same limited frequency bandwidth? I mean, currently, 2 people on cellphones that are 300 miles from each other can't interfere with each other's available bandwidth, because the signals don't reach that far (and don't need to). But with airships like this one, they will interfere. You'll be wedging 1 million people's traffic into the same frequencies that currently only handle 1000. Can that be done?
In the wired world, more wires equals more bandwidth. In wireless, there's no equivalent, there's only one "air".
In order to make the laying of fiber (or any other cable) profitable, typically companies have to hope for a monopoly service so they can charge whatever is necessary to recoup their costs. But, in an age in which other means of Internet and telephone access exist, that's an impossible requirement. Competition would exist from day one from cable and telephone operators, supplying a service that may be "good enough" for most consumers.
This quagmire of businesses being unable to guarantee the business case exists for producing a modern telecommunications infrastructure will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that bandwidth is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by telephone companies (both mobile and fixed line), cable operators, Craig McCaw, satellite operators, and now broadband-over-airship operators, to create an infrastructure that will provide more plentisome bandwidth to a large group of people, but that if new businesses continue to be unable to justify the huge expense of laying a genuinely large enough pipe to every home to create enough bandwidth to support just about any application, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how the lack of bandwidth harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on bandwidth.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Remember, it was thanks to ordinary people like YOU that we are now seeing such innovations as SMP in OpenBSD. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
KMSMA (WWBD?)
There's been some SBIRS contracts from the government for the developement of manned/unmanned very high altitude airships with large electrical capability. The idea is the dev costs for this airship are large, so go in with the military to develop a toy they want. Such an airship could use the solar array to "charge up" fuel cells over time while loitering, then use the stored power for high demand applications like AWACS radars, electric weaponry such as microwaves or lasers (or as it has been seriously proposed, a laser mirror repeater for the ABL). A great recon and monitoring asset, relatively cheap, hard to kill with third world weapons, and you get some chump company to work out the details of making it into the commstation of doom, since the military is begging for bandwidth.
Makes one wonder who are the initial investors...