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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!"
Brings new meaning to connection is down ;-)
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I really hope this becomes a popular alternative for satellites as a provider of these services. This has got to cost significantly less, and hopefully these saving will be passed on to consumers.
Satellite is even more expensive and you can forget gaming or uploading.
Is that 65,000 or 66,560 feet?
Yeah, I think maybe you are just a naysayer... DSL and cable work great... if you can get them. I'm not just talking about 'less metropolitan' areas, as you call them. There are plenty of places where you can't get DSL (e.g. pair-gain) or cable (houses just aren't wired). In Sydney, for example - just read one of the many despairing articles on www.whirlpool.net.au forums. Even wifi (for example www.unwired.com.au) leaves lots of black spots. This is a way of giving an entire city access in one shot. Let me also add that this kind of addition to the broadband arsenal gives more choice - and more choice is good, right? :)
As for satellite, if you had RTFA then you would have seen that this idea is much less expensive and more reusable than satellites.
Does anyone know of plans to make a rail-gun that can shoot 65,000 ft. (No relation to this article, just asking)
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!
Well, first of all, this can be a lot faster than setellite, because you only have 13 miles of time lag, instead of 24,000 miles. Second, maintenance is a lot easier than satellite. Once you have a satellite in geostationary orbit, even the shuttle can't service it - even when the shuttle is flying. And how expensive is it? Well, it's less expensive than launching into geostationary orbit... But is it enough cheaper than cable/DSL and enough faster than dialup to matter to people? I don't know.
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.)
The system is down!!!
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Support: This is Gas Bag Networks, how my I help you? Customer; Yeah, the Internet went down. Support: Can you describe the problem? Customer: The &!#!&#$ blimp crashed into my livingroom!
Support: Sir, the network appears to be fine. We have not received any reports of trouble from your area.
Customer: I can see the blimp smoldering in my living room.
Support: We require several people in your area to report a problem before we can open a ticket for you.
Custumer: The blimp has crashed through my living room ceiling, I need help.
Support: Sir, what operating system are you running?
Customer: Why does that matter, the blimb is down. Please send someone.
Support: Sir, are you using a router?
Customer: Uh, yes.
Support: Sir, could you please reset your router by unplugging it, waiting 30 seconds, and then powering it on. Please tell me when you have done this.
Customer: What does my router have to do with the blimp crashing!!
Support: Sir, lets try disconnecting your router completely and plugging your network directly into the BlimpoNIC.
Customer: Listen here buddy, there is nothing wrong with my computer. Your blimp has crashed into my living room!
Support: Sir, let me connect you to our public relations department. Before I do so, is there anything else I can help you with today?
Customer: No!
Support: I'm transferring you now sir.
Click...DIALTONE
Satellite works great? I take you you don't like to telecommute, play games, use voice over IP, or just about anything else that depends on latency. Satellites give you high ping times because light takes a long time to travel up and back down. These airships are high enough that the problem won't vanish entirely, but they are far lower than satellites, and the ping times should be reasonable enough to make applications like the ones I mentioned usable. This is an enormous improvement for users in rural areas.
:P, fixing things that aren't broke is what the technology industry is all about.
Aside from the fact that it IS broke, and no I won't pardon your insolence, stupidity, or lack of logic
At the very least, if this fails you'll be able to get good quality airships for cheap at auction. Imagine what you could do with one of these, it's perfect for up and coming supervillains. These things are suitable for heavy lifting and transport duties, allowing you to carry enough supplies to life off for months and even deploy helicopters. The location gives you excellent sensor range even if you're positioned over international waters, as well as making this an ideal missile launching platform.
It becomes even more compelling when you build a fleet of airships. With enough redundancy to withstand attacks and keep all the bases covered regarding supplies, fuel, deployable vehicles, and armaments, these airships would make a very suitable mobile base of operations. Perfect for those who can't be sequestered in a remote island lair.
Most important of all, just imagine how cool it would be! Put on some classical aviator outfits, go forth onto the bow, cast against the panorama of your harsh azure domain. Astride an entire world, master of all you survey, the piercing frigidity of the howling wind is surpassed only by your cold, unforgiving glare. No mere ant below can hope to contend with one to whom Olympus is but a speck, one who has usurped the very domain of Zeus himself. Count your days, hopeless mortals, for by this iron hand the sky is falling!
Why don't we instead 'ORGANIZE' and fight the political system that is against us with their big corporate cronyism campaigns with traditional protests?
We should be fighting for Fiber to the curb with municipal broadband and 100 megabit access to the net. We are being pushed around like 'slaves' . I am sick and damn tired of it.
Doesn't anyone understand that whats going on with broadband is a microcosm of our 'EVIL' political-corporate system.
When will one person in the media stand up against the cable monopolies and tell them that what they are doing by preventing municipal broadband is wrong.
Short answer : No Long answer: Using the dimensions of the airship (245 x 145 x 87 feet), the altitude (~65,000 ft), and some very basic trig., the airship would be 13 X 7.6 X 4.6 seconds of arc. if you were standing directly underneath it. Since the human eye has a resolution of roughly 2 mintes of arc, and this is far larger than the angular size of the airship, you wouldn't see it.
"Me fail English, that's unpossible." --Ralphie
>>I really don't think this will be all that good. First of all, I don't know a whole lot about
>>satellite transmission, but I know it's a lot slower than standard internet technology.
These things will be much closer (by a factor of 1000) than satelites, so they should be competitive speedwise, and use far less power to transmit. Theyll also cover a much smaller area each, and thus allow for more bandwidth
>> someone will still have to have a physical presense sooner or later to fix something or
>> install new hardware.
Satellites dont need (or are able to receive) maintenence. nd in any case these things should be able to be floated down for repairs
>>Also, how much is this going to cost?
A lot, but far less than sattelites. My guess is that it will be comparable to a 3G mobile network.
>>Furthermore, I think the reliability will be rather low. I don't know why, but I just have a
>>bad feeling about tons of servers and equipment suspended in the air.
Well, the stratosphere is a reasonably quiet place, with no changing weather. It is far above commercial planes. I thinks they can use ionic engines for station keeping. These are reliable (years of continuous use) and low consumption.
>>I think it will be more productive, cheap, and reliable to use lots of inexpensive 802.11
>>equipment.
I think covering entire cities with wi-fi (with all ensuing basing concessions and line of sigth issues) would be more unpractical than having one or two stratospheric blimps floating above.
- Geosync orbit is 35786 km. Latency is at least 240ms one way for any packet (up and back) - higher if you are not directly under the satellite. Talk to any gamer and they would be unimpressed. With this, at 65000ft or about 20km, the latency due to distance is under 1ms.
- Its cheap - as they say you can quickly drop one anywhere, anytime you need it. e.g. place one above a ballgame to deal with all the cellphone calls (and whose to say they can't lower it if the weathers ok!)
As to the market... I live in Auckland, NZ, and we have a very slow uptake of broadband due to a single provider who owns all copper to the house (read: ugly monopoly and weak government regulator). Other wireless options exist if you live close to them (e.g. if you can see the skytower). Drop one of these above the city and bingo - broadband for the price of an aerial.I think that model is transportable - anywhere the infrastructure is too expensive or too difficult to provide broadband or telephones - simply drop in one of these. For example:
- Monopoly copper to the house
- Difficult terrain
- Sparse neighborhoods
And they are relatively cheap - its just a balloon. A nice one, sure, but still just a balloon. One that they can take down and service. Can't do that with a satellite.Obviously another satisfied AOL customer.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
I had a cox cable connection that was strung too low over an alley, and periodically some sort of truck would pull the cable down. I would call the cable company, and go through the whole rigamarole you describe, before, finally, getting someone who could understand that the physical cable was lying in my back yard and no amount of fiddling would make it work. To get those dingbats to understand that the cable was PHYSICALLY DOWN and nothing they could do would fix it took hours.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
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.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
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