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Internet-By-Airship Scheduled For Trial Next Month
Reader ScrewTivo points to this Economist article on one of my favorite potential delivery means for high-speed Net access: stratosphere-dwelling airships. This version, from Sanswire Networks, is dubbed a "Stratellite," -- and one is scheduled to launch next month. As the submitter writes, "It's basically a blimp that thinks it's a geostationary satellite floating at 65K feet!"
Satellite is even more expensive and you can forget gaming or uploading.
Not that it matters. Just curious.
I have been following stratospheric airship technology for years, and discuss some of the interesting tidbits I've collected over the years at:
http://thewired.blogs.com/teotwawki/
Under the technology section.
The military is considerably more technically advanced in terms of airship tech than what is currently being acknowledged. The big, generally slow, often triangular UFO sightings that have taken place over the past decade or more are sightings of next-gen airships. There is some indication that they may employ more exotic propulsion technologies than traditional blimps.
See:
DARPA's Project WALRUS
DARPA's Project ISIS
The Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency's tests of using airships as platforms for mirrors used in ground-based laser weapon systems
The timeframe discussed, as well as on-record comments from DARPA that electrostatic propulsion is something that is being investigated for the airships, seem to add weight to the argument that these are in fact considerably more advanced than what many folks may be thinking of.
There is obviously a lot of commercial use for stratospheric airships. Here's to hoping that this is a tech that may finally be ready to emerge from the black world!
Another article includes comments from the CEO that clearly implies that they don't yet even have a "commercial strategy for deployment."
Don't hold your breath folks. This is just a, um, trial baloon to get interest before their summit (aka sales presntation.)
speed: satellite is so slow because its so extreamly far away, and because most people have to use a landline to upload. this is able to solve both of those problems, so i expect it to be about as fast as any broadband. all youre doing is sending a signal into the sky for a few hundred miles, at whatever speed they travel at. (speed of light? do radio transmissions travel slower?) expect your connection to go to hell on cloudy days though. :O
reliability: im sure theyve worked out all the engineering numbers on this. its eally easy to suspend an air balloon at that high, because theres so little wind to deal with. its really just physics anyways: you have X tons of equipment, X mass of helium will raise that weight. people didnt trust boats made of metal at first either. :-P
the way i see it, if they cant get the numbers to work, they they lose money, not me. if it comes out and its really nice, maybe ill sign up, maybe not. but if it sucks, i havent wasted any money on it.
This is just another wireless pie in the sky idea to defraud unwitting investors. My parents once invested thousands of dollars in a company that was promising to run wireless from the rooftops of tall buildings in flat cities. The same promises were made, but the crooks running the outfit took the money and ran off. Then there's a laundry list of big name flops in this area, primarily Ricochet networks (wireless from lightpoles), Teledesic (wireless by LEO satellite) and Terabeam (wireless by laser). I cringe at the thought of all the gullible people who went out and bought their stock today on the hype alone.. .
/. must be able to estimate the amount they can generate from a football-field-sized solar panel array, and compare it to how much power is needed. My guess is that it will be meager at best.
The FAQ on their website talks about no substantive issues. One critical factor is the amount of power available to the transponders, and this is not mentioned at all. Someone on
Another critical factor is latency. You are going to add 13 miles up and 13 miles down through clouds, rain, snow, sleet, and pollution. Wireless signals over 900 Mhz don't travel well through water, and can even be blocked by heavy tree foliage. So there goes 3G, unless you only want fair weather 3G. One thing is for sure, the latency is going to be worse than my cable modem, and it is going to have more periods of dead connection. Those who have had both satellite TV and cable TV will know what I'm talking about.
Latency is intolerable for the kind of high-bandwidth applications they are promising. Wherever you can get a wired connection, it would be preferred even it if it is a little more expensive. That leaves the potential market for "Stratellites" service to only those fringe situations where wired is unavailable. This is a far smaller market than the promises they imply in their so called "market research" page that talks about millions of Internet subscribers.
I see more pitfalls than possibilities.
At the 65K foot hieght they are talking about They are well above even the highest of storm clouds (50K feet is the top height I was able to find listed by the national weather service.) Also high enough to be above commercial and military flight paths. So weather is not a problem.
_ cedar_sporadic_e.pdf
s sue1/seumahu/seumahu.html
The other thought I've seen expressed concerns lag time With only 65K feet to transgress the lag shouldn't be any greater than wired communications in any single band. Point being that 13 miles isn't that great a distance for radio wave propogation ( 3,00000 km per second in vacuum ) So unlike SatCom where You have to calculate in Phase delay etc there is none of that affecting something at such a low height. Granted in it's initial phase it may not be the ideal gaming platform for some really lag sensitive games for most situations it won't be a concern.
What does have potential affects can be things like ground clutter (Extreme example turn on your microwave while using 802.11b in a small apartment.) Radio shadow. (tall buildings) etc. However these are things that affect a number of current radio communications systems and the 13M hieght will help. (Thats why the roof of the tallest building in a city is such valuable real estate)
The other neat thing is that you have a much lower horizon affect (the horizon is farther away from the top of a mountain than at sea level.) etc. I wouldn't expect it to be reliable for symetric communications links (The power down will be easier to create than the power up from a small device like a handheld. So give the db loss over the distance you won't find yourself serving a slashdotable server off of the connection. But for e-mail, blackberry, web surfing or sending off a modified spread sheet to the boss I would expect it would equal normal home DSL without a problem.
Strange too that no one ever talks about the lag in wired communications even though it is there. I remember as a child talking with my Aunt and Uncle living in Europe at the time on the phone. You really had a problem with knowing when the other person was speaking because of the lag.
Some useful links
http://www.cosmic.ucar.edu/related_papers/2002_wu
http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/SSC/CSER/UOSAT/IJSSE/i
URL:http://www.vigyanprasar.com/ham/IONOS.htm
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Let us also remember that these 65,000 ft airships can also be used for surveillance. The U.S. military apparently has a black program using these as well.
Nyekulturniy... Proudly confusing readers and editors since 1981!
Large scale Airships/platforms can, should, and must be a significant part of the evolving technology for providing;
1. Global telecommunications
Smaller airships placed well above normal air traffic, provide a tremendous opportunity for cost effective, high performance, communication services. Other robotic technolgies use most of their energy to keep the airship aloft. By making the vehicle lighter than air, you can use that solar energy collection for providing service, and thrust. That and, a lighter than air vehicle could collect solar energy from much larger surface area making is totally self sustaining, and providing an operational life competitive with a number of satellites at pennies on the dollar in investment cost.
2. Cargo transport
Designs for high performance cargo and freight air transport (vehicles capable of hypersonic speeds) has existed for some time now. The opportunities for all people, made possible by large jet powered airship transport, boggle the imagination. The cost savings alone, and the ability to make decisions that turn on a moment, would enable the creation of new industries, while transforming existing ones.
3. Solar energy collection
Larger craft placed along a broad equatorial belt could in theory collect tremendous amounts of solar energy. These devices would operate at incredible efficiency, above the weather, and unhampered by significant amounts of obscuring atmosphere, a fleet of several thousand would reduce the amount of sunlight striking the hottest part of the earth, and might also make a dent in global warming. By keeping the ships moving the impact of the vehicles on any one place would be negligible. By using significant amounts of solar power, we could begin to loosen the economic and political stranglehold imposed by fossil fuel consumption, and protect the more critical needs for oil in the long haul (advanced materials, drugs, and organic chemicals.) Finally such craft flying at the right altitude could use a small amount of their power to reseed the ozone layer... this would be a temperary solution until the use of ozone depleting chemicals ends.
4. High altitude research facilities
We've spent many billions of dollars for putting telescopes in space and at the tops of mountains. By building ultrahigh altitude research platforms, we should be able to get most of the benefit of space based research, at nearly terrestrial costs. This of course presumes a robust economy in building airships at a reasonable price, but once the process begins, it should become self sustaining within a very few years.
5. And low cost space launch
It's possible to lift a significant payload and launch vehicle over a 100,000 feet using a powered airship technology. By lifting payloads this high, we eliminate 90% of the atmospheric drag encountered in carrying hardware into space. By adding solar powered magrail acceleration technology to small and medium sized launch vehicles with scamjet technology, we get a fleet of reuseable spacecraft, that can put significant payloads into orbit, at costs orders of magnitude cheaper than currently encountered. This would open a neorenaissance in space exploration and commerce.
Lighter than air craft are absolutely essential, in opening up the frontiers of space, and making possible the kinds of transformations in human industry critically needed if all the people of the world are to benefit from human discovery and technology. Rather than inventing better bombs, and promoting a superior theology, it's my contention, that the most powerful countries in the world must begin embracing a larger view of what's possible for humanity. That these countries must begin building an infrastructure for all people to gain benefit, and ultimately achieve the fruits of fulfilling on their potential. The future of people requires that we throw off our shackle, that includes the bondage of gravity, and the limits imposed by antiquated thinking.
Genda Bendte
"The meek shall inherit the Earth, the rest of us will go to the stars..." - Isaac Asimov
Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson's new space-tourism company, which has licensed Mr Rutan's technology, already has £800m ($1.5 billion)-worth of ticket reservations, though flights will not begin until 2007.
Thats right, at about $400,000 a flight that means about 3750 people have already signed up. That comes out to be 1875 flights of the yet to be built space ship ones. I think this is very impressive because even with a flight of ten ships flying 25 times a year (quite unlikely, becuase they will mostlikely have to be overhauled sometime) it will take seven and half years to get everybody up.
That is, if they stick with the 3 person spaceship. On the discovery channel special I saw Burt Rutan working on a 5 or 7 person ship too. This would make things much more reasonable.
Optical is unreliable for stratellite-to-ground connections, due to weather. However, there is effectively no weather at 65K feet, so the stratellites can talk to each other using lasers. These guys are claiming a 500-mile line-of-sight visiblity to the ground, but if you read the fine print, the effective radius to the ground is really only 75 miles. Of coures, 75 Miles is truly impressive. The 500-mile number is still important, because it is a good approximation for the distance at which a stratellite can "see" another stratellite using a laser, above the highest clouds. Consider a grid of these beasties to cover a region of 3000mi x 2000 mi (i.e., the contenental US.) This will require 6x4= 24 Stratellites. Using lasers, this grid can carry all long-haul traffic. Local loop (WiFi, 75-mi radius) would require 3000x2000/(75x75) = (30x20x4/3x4/3)= 600x16/9)= (3200/3) = about 1000 Stratellites. However, the population density is massively skewed, so we can use expensive antennas in rural areas and cheap antennas in urban areas. Using a rural antenna, we can "see" a stratellite that is 500mi away, so we need 24 stratellites to handle rural antennas. we now add "urban' stratellites as needed. Conclusion: 24 Stratellites will cover the US, giving base coverage of (say) 20 Kbps/sq mi for non-urban areas. We then add additional stratellites based on population density at (say) 100Kbps/person. Worst-case we need 1000 stratellites, but we probably end up with about 100 stratellites to cover the population.
Initially, I was impressed. But then I realized, how's my little-iddy-biddy laptop gonna get the power to transmitt WIFI signals to the airship that's potentially half way across Texas? I have hard enough time using my laptop in the back yard without losing signal, let alone half way across the state of Texas.