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Broadband from Airships
rustbear writes "The BBC reports that researchers looking to the skies to provide super-fast internet access via airships have proved it can successfully operate a data rate link of 11Mbps. Trials were conducted using a 12,000 cubic metre balloon, flying at an altitude of around 24 kilometres for nine hours. 'Proving the ability to operate a high data rate link from a moving stratospheric balloon is a critical step in moving towards the longer term aim of providing data rates of 120Mbps,' said Dr David Grace, the project's principal scientific officer. 'Balloons hovering in the stratosphere could become an attractive alternative as consumers demand ever higher bandwidth", said Alan Gobbi, the acting manager of the York Electronic Centre. With each airship being able to support an area of 60 kilometres, there would only need to be "a handful" to offer complete coverage in the UK, he added. Trials of the technology will continue in Japan next year.'"
it doesn't seem like something you should always rely on, what about storms? i know in florida relying on something like this would be a disaster (i mean heck, my landline cable will likely be out after this 'cane hits this weekend!)
-- lol pwned
Wonder what the public reception (pun intended) and reaction will be to the number of airships necessary to provide complete coverage.
Also, it's not clear since both the slashdot post (quoting accurately from the article) and the article mention coverage at "..., With each airship being able to support an area of 60 kilometres...". Ignoring the fact that kilometres is a measurement of distance not area, what does this mean? Since the article claims at that coverage they would only need a "handful" or airships to provide complete coverage I'm going to infer:
Regardless, I would still be curious if that many craft in the air would be an eyesore, or something we adapt to. There is anecdotal evidence resistance to these kinds of things can be quite strong even with benefits to the population (case in point -- wind farms). (And there is STILL resistance to and legal activity around where and how cell-towers can be erected.)
(I guess someone's going to have to fill me in on how large a 12,000 cubic meter balloon appears at 24 kilometers.... let's see, if it were a cube, that would be about 23 meters each side... which is about 65 ft. per side... okay, never mind... smaller than a jet liner at 78,000 ft... sigh)
pirates
I'm hoping that they don't coat the balloons with a flamable doping, so that there's no chance of flaming zeplins of doom from falling out of the skies. It would bring a new meaning to the "Internet being down" though, wouldn't it?
Oh the Humanity! My wireless quit!
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
super-fast internet access via airships
Did someone find the floating rock from Final Fantasy 1 or are we talking about the Goodyear blimp?
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
But war ballooning doesn't sound quite right.
I don't get it.
If you stick the Jolly Rodger through the balloon, it deflates.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
60 kilometers is a distance. 60km^2 is an area.
Unless we all live in the world of Paper Mario and nobody remembered to tell me
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
So theoretically, if a country switched to a few of these, they would be a few anti-aircraft missiles away from being without internet access? Seems that centralizing them in the air like that kind of makes them vulnerable to being quickly and easily destroyed...
Join the Empire! http://www.empirereborn.net/
With each airship being able to support an area of 60 kilometres, there would only need to be "a handful" to offer complete coverage in the UK, he added.
60 Kilometers is a distance, not an area. Maybe they meant 60km^2? or a 60km radius? There's a really big difference, watch your units guys.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Is this the first time that "super-fast", "airships", and "successfully" have been used together in the same sentence?
Why slashdot? Why not?
I don't want my Internet access floating around on some balloon that can get blown, and harmed by the weather. How about we spend money on improving our current wireless grounded technology so we can go through buildings and other things that get in our way instead of trying to float balloons over them.
Airgo Networks is already preparing a copyright infringement suit.
Would be handy for supplying communications for emergency services. For instance, in the aftermath of a hurricane, or earthquake, this could be brought in to connect emergency service providers on the ground using battery or generator powered laptops / handhelds or VOIP phones. One of the problems during the aftermath of Katrina was landlines were down, almost all wireless phones were down (except for one or two spots) and the NOPD emergency comm system had failed.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Do you honestly think anyone would pay for sperm from Slashdot users?
I mean, I would think a checkbox on the question "Do you Read Slashdot" would automatically exclude someone.
Is it just me or does this reek with the smattering of turn of the century visions of a Utopian society? This sounds like the kind of thing people would have laughed at in a science fiction novel because it is just does not seem realistic. I'd hate to be a tech for one of those floating targets - that would take one tall ladder. Not to mention the fact that they could paint a bullseye on you for when some rouges sends a homebrew drone into one (or a few) of those.
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
I'll bet its easier/faster/cheaper to launch a backup balloon than it is to splice a fibre optic that was cut by a backhoe (the natural preditor of LANS.)
Think global, act loco
as consumers demand ever higher bandwidth
The puns that could flow from this topic are too numerous for the mind to fathom without exploding ^_^
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
are you kidding? slashdot sperm gives new mean to the term 'its virgin quality'!!!!
;-)
No need for disease testing
Hasn't this idea... been floating around for a while?
Regards, Phil
yeah it's faster than my Dial up, faster than my current DSL. But the stories about WiMax refer to 50-100 Mbs. And it should take less investment to add a WiMax transmitter to current cell towers than to invent a way to keep blimps at 24km reliably, without storm clouds providing interference.
I mean, 11Mbs is one more than the 10 in good old "10 base T", right? I say, not fast enough to bother... blah.
-- Mr. Curmudgeon...
I saw something in the Wall Street Journal about using very-high-altitude airships to replace satellites. If the technology were developed some, they'd be a lot easier to replace than a satellite, and you don't need to worry about NASA (and other space agencies') help putting them up all the way in geosynchronous orbit, so there's a lot more potential for neat stuff on the platform. And you can move another one up there, and then take the original down for upgrades. Less risk from micrometeorites, too.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I assumed he meant 60km^2, but even then, the UK is 244,820 square kilometers big. Dividing 244,820 by 60 gets you 4,081 airships to cover all of the UK. That's hardly a handful.
--
RumorsDaily
Yes, it's a corporate site, but scroll down the site for some good links to follow to learn about HAPs and their use as communications infrastructure.
http://www.elec.york.ac.uk/comms/haps.html
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Why can't they just make broadband tower transmitters instead? I don't see the sense of a flying airship when you can have it safely rooted in the ground. What happens when it floats away? No more internets :(
SSID = LedZeppelin
Gives a new meaning to the network being DOWN or having CRASHED, doesn't it?
:)
If they're ballons I wonder if they'll still call them Points of Presence (POP) or not.
could similar balloons provide cellular phone coverage and replace cell towers?
I didn't destroy the joke by explaining it, it was not very funny to begin with... And besides, a satellite is even higher (but so is its latency...)
A W E S O M E !
NATION WOWED BY TREMENDOUS HINDENBURG EXPLOSION
Gay Ball of Flame Warms Hearts Chilled by Depression
"Oh, the Luminosity!" Radio Announcer Says
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Columbia will use 5 Stratellites to provide a wireless broadband network. This seems like the same thing. Nothing new under the sun? Not from this story anyway.
Think Deeply.
Just another means of advertising...
We'll see ballons with Pepsi, Google, Intel, and Microsoft all over the place..
By the way, if I was the first one to think of that then PATENT PENDING!!
Mua ha ha ha
Jimi Spier
www.jimispier.com - My tunes
Can't get enough of porn even in an airship eh?
Let's see, 1000 people running 11 million ... carry the 4,
take the square root ... that's a total of 11Gbps of data. How many people are in an area 60km in radius? If that's over a city, 50-100 thousand, assume 10% penetration, that's 5 to 10 thousand users in just that one small area. Are they planning on carrying a large raft of cache servers aloft with these balloons, or are people going to be very dissappointed the first time they try to pull full-rate data out of the air?
That's the same problem that makes them iffy for emergency services use. Fine for light use, but overloaded the first time they are needed.
Dear OP, I don't blame you for your silly pun, I blame the morons that support unfunny posts like yours by modding them up.
In the last eight years I've heard airships proposed for
1) Carrying large loads over long distances (more energy efficient than planes and capable of carrying large cargo).
2) Mobile phone networks rather than masts (like this internet one)
3) "Air cruises"
4) Global survelliance (over using sats)
And to be honest a whole raft of other things, it just seems to be one of those things that researchers ALWAYS think is a good idea.
Getting a PhD 101
1) Find the problem
2) Define the Airship solution
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Missles....or my BB gun.
Me and my trusty Red Rider BB gun could do some serious DDoS. Don't test me or I'll shoot your eye out.
Are these the same airships that homeland security will be using for surveillance purposes? Would be an interesting replacement for carnivore with the "right" equipment on board. Not only would they be able to easedrop, they would be able to triangulate moving target, etc etc. Then of course there will be the cameras...
Don't we get this story every few months? About half the time it's this outfit in York, and the other half it's someone else.
Fair play to their PR people - they seem to be doing a good job - but surely this is in the "never going to happen" category?
You can be pretty sure that a mostly transparent balloon, flying at these altitudes, is as good as invisible to the naked eye. And a tiny dot in the sky is much less an eyesore than a large windfarm just off the coast. Not that I think that's an eyesore, BTW.
I wonder whether planes aren't more practical than ballons for this purpose. A balloon slowly leaks out gas, so how long it can stay up there is limited by that leakage.
How long a plane can stay up there, is limited by fuel. Now if you use a solar cell powered plane (NASA built one some time ago), the time it can stay up there is mostly limited by wear and tear of mechanical parts. That might be much longer than a leaking balloon.
I'm not sure how this balloon is kept in the same place, for a plane that would be easy. And you'll probably need some additional energy to power the communication equipment. A solar-powered plane would already have solar cells for that.
Looks nice either way. One of the problems with satellite communication is high latency (due to the sheer height of geo-stationary orbit). A 'satellite' in the stratosphere makes that problem go away.No one has pointed out that these are nano airships! An area of 60 Km^2 is a circle with a diameter of less then 9 Km, which means quite a large number to cover England, let alone the whole UK. This also means that the wireless equipment is smaller still.
Good luck finding one when they blow away.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The FAA will probably require that it have flashing lights at night and be covered in red and white checkerboard. It should also have a radar transponder. Assuming that it is solar powered, the night time lighting requirement might require such heavy batteries that the project becomes unfeasable.
Latest implementation of RFC 1149 ?
Or, should that be, "Aviation Carriers"?
http://www.21stcenturyairships.com/
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
24km there is no weather ...... no wind either ......
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
BPL was bad enough..
We want buried fibre, FTTH, there is no substitute
"There is no try, only do", Yoda
-=[ place
Now *that's* what I call a raised floor!
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
... we were just about to get FIOS!
I think they meant 60Km radius which would equate to 120Km diameter.
, 00.html
If I remember circular area as Pi * r(squared) , then it is roughly 11,300 sq Km.
One over a Metropolis could cover it all.
22 would cover the Sq Km of the UK except the patterns are circular, and thus would
have to partially overlap to provide total coverage.
Thus most likely doable with less than 33 of them .
And it is alot cheaper than some satellite projects that have been posited .
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,12464
Teledesic, Iridium, and others cannot compete with this on a cost to repair basis alone.
The balloons by www.21stcenturyairships.com can be launched and landed by remote control.
Serviced by a field tech with a pick-up, No rockets, no astronomical budget.
They might even be cheaper than building towers just due to topographical terrain signal outage reasons.
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
This is an easy one... your approximation of the sides is OK, but I'll use the volume of a sphere (4/3 * pi * r ^ 3 =~ 4.5 * r^3), so it's about 12000/4.5 =~ 3000, then take the cube root - about 14 meters radius. Now, the visual size of it is a simple proportion. If you want to know how big it will look at 10 meters (across the street), then just figure the proportion from 24 km to 10 m, which is 24000 / 10 = 2400, so at 24 km away it will look like an object 1/2400th its size across the street. 14/2400 =~ 1/170, so it will look like something 1/170th of a meter across the street. A meter is about 40 inches, so 40/170 = less than 1/4 of an inch. Since we were dealing with radius, it's 1/2 an inch in diameter.
These balloons will look like something 1/2 inch across will look from across the street. They'll be difficult to see at all.
It's the British contribution to the space race.
I don't image the broadband bit will work for very long. As soon as the thing gets to any altitude, a UK space expert who looks like Worzel Gummidge will appear on TV and announce that the experiment has proved a world-beating success and one in the eye for the ambitions of America, China, Russia, etc., to explore the solar system.
We will be assured that the crew have an ample supply of Eccles cake and liquorice allsorts. Presumably an airship is needed because only something that size can hoist aloft a passenger cabin containing an Aga and a flush lavatory, thus allowing unlimited quantities of tea and toast to be consumed. There is talk of a Nobel Prize for the mission designer.
At this stage the truth will emerge - having sent the airship aloft a mysterious technical error prevents the controllers from ever getting it down again. The airship will probably last be heard of careering around somewhere over the Indian Ocean, beaming down the Des O'Connor Show and the racing results from Epsom to a baffled audience in Tamil Nadu.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
The professor of a Communications class I had once said this:
"In our line of work there is nothing more dangerous than an idiot with a backhoe and a good idea."
This have been brought up several times, by different companies aiming at providing internet access using different sorts of air ships. Throughout the dot com days, several companies provided such wishful thinking and with great press releases.
Dig through slashdot history and you'll find it.
Yet no one delivered something main stream which
can compete with terrestial based alternatives
either economical nor performance wise.
Damn I'm getting old.
Deploying such aerial installation for emergency coverage
on the other hand in the lack of others, could be useful
though. But seriously not under stable conditions in
developed areas, forget about it..
11Mbps? Well, so it's just old 802.11b... Nothing to see here, move along.
;-)
echo "getuid(){return 0;}" > e.c; gcc -shared -o e.so e.c; LD_PRELOAD=./e.so sh
802.11 balloons are so two months ago.
Just kidding. We had a few problems, but hope to do better next time. I have done the math this time and know what is needed to make it happen.
--fatboy
http://img369.imageshack.us/img369/2397/woot9yp.jp g/Woot
Cellphones were the rage at the time, now it's just being applied to data. I never heard if this ever went anywhere: http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/ptech/02/22/cell .phones.balloons/?related
Recently, AC Propulsion's SoLong solar powered aircraft recently proved that a 48 hour flight was possible. And before that, the Helios solar powered aircraft that was able to reach 95000 feet under it's own power was enough to convice Sky Tower that this was a viable business idea.
Of course, way back in the 80's there was the SHARP aircraft that was powered by a microwave antenna on the ground beaming power up to it.
So, yes, solar is an option that is definitely in the running and blimps will have to work hard to beat them at this game.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
Exuse my total idiocy, for I have never posted on slashdot before. *http://img369.imageshack.us/img369/2397/woot9yp.j pg
I fear for the slashdot effect.. It would seem like the Hindenberg revisited when servers come to a flaming, crashing hault.
Yeah, your cube root was impressive... the thing that surprised me was that you did the hard part and then stopped.
Flying data platforms are to slashdot as the end of the IC engine and flying cars were/are to Popular Mechanics and PopSci.
I don't know if this has been brought up but how long before wi-fi is trying to pass itself off as an alternitive to cellular.
The line-of sight range to an airship at 25km altitude is about 565km. LOS range to a location at the earth's surface is determined from Pythagoras' theroem. The earth's circumference is about 40,000km, so the earth's radius Re is about 6370km. At height h, LOS = sqrt((Re+h)^2-Re^2) = sqrt(2*Re*h+h^2). The textbook approximation LOS=sqrt(2*Re*h) is valid for Re>>h. Conclusion: they're probably using a narrow antenna beam to reduce the coverage area
But yes, it would really rock - and every couple of years delay means that the potential network speed tends to increase. Somebody else wrote that you could do TV broadcast from these things instead of satellite - that might be an actually viable business model, if you can get the spectrum allocation issues worked out.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The guys at Sanswire have been at this for a couple of years now with their stratellites ...
http://www.sanswire.net/
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
A circle that has an area of 60km^2 has a radius of 4.5km. The distance from a station on the perimeter of this little circle to the balloon is 24.5km = sqrt( 4.5^2 + 24^2 ), by Pythagoras. Nobody would ever deploy a transmitter that could reach 24km, but not 500m further.
The angle subtended by a station on the perimiter of the little circle and a second station on the perimiter diametrically opposed to the first is 20 degrees = 2 * arctan( 4.5/24 ). Nobody would ever deploy an antenna with a 20 degree beamwidth for this application.
If the circle has a radius of 60km, then the station on the perimeter is 64km away from the baloon (less than 10db down compared to a station directly underneath, 24km away), and the beamwidth would be about 135 degrees. Much more likely.
No, its right. They plan to implement the plan in a few light years. At that time, you should expect download rates of up to 10 kilopascals - available of a low, low price of only 30 monies. The only problem is that this technology uses more energy - you may have to pay for as much as fifty more watts than you're paying for now.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I can't be the only one to have pictured various Final Fantasy characters surfing the net while enroute to their next destination in their airships...
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
Satelite communications work fine through stormclouds. Ditto all manner of ground-based communications passing horizontally trough many times as much storm as these signals will need to pass trough vertically. Water is mediocre (but sufficient) at disrupting a narrow band of frequencies. Engineers who can figure out how to keep a stratospheric communications balloon on station can figure out how to pick a frequency outside this band.
to spy on us even more, maybe some one puts a throne in it and B*sh and his monkeys rule from the sky (air superiority?).....
I was a stranger for the thing, i wasn't facing the crowd, ive been riding on empty with my head in the clouds
I wonder if the balloons can be tethered using nanotube cables
of the Royal Reserve Ballooneers.
And consider a much larger floating platform, one on the order of a square kilometer, made up of a carbon fiber grid about ten meters in height. Balloons can be placed at regular intervals, with access to them via the adjoining cells. On the underside, there is a large amount of space in which one can hang MANY antennas and cameras, each individually capable of being repositioned and/or set to different frequencies to avoid interference. Along the topside there is an extensive array of solar cells to keep the onboard batteries charged and power the tons of electronics the thing will carry aloft.
It's a communications and mapping services platform, running a wireless network, broadcast HDTV, VoIP, and various leased VPN services. Also, the cameras would provide varying degrees of timeliness in a very high-resolution form, such that people concerned with doing real-time surveillance would pay a high rate, but people more interested in reasonably accurate mapping info could pay a lesser rate for week-old (or month-old, year-old, etc) imagery. Store owners could restrict the scope of their surveillance coverage to their buildings, for an appropriate reduction in the subscription fee. Google might choose to upgrade the currency of their imagery by purchasing access to month-old images, updated daily (so that every image is exactly one month old). And of course, the intelligence services would get something superior to the very best orbiting surveillance cameras, and could pay for dedicated camera access for a flotilla of cameras, sufficient to monitor the activities of every square meter that they behold.
There's a lot of ways to play this, but basically, you have a permanently floating platform that can cover not just all of the U.K. but probably all of Europe as well, depending on just how many antennas and cameras you chose to put on a one square kilometer island in the sky.
Permanent? Won't it leak gas and eventually descend? Not if you drop a line to a supply airship and pull up regular tanks of hydrogen (or water, and convert it to H2 and O2 onboard). I would envision a small crew of 10-20 individuals who would crew the thing 24x7 for 6 months at a time, arriving the same way that the water and other supplies do. An on-board hydroponics facility and extensive recycling would keep the size of the regular supply run to a minimum. Refrigeration would not be a problem, just store perishables in a chamber that's open to the (fairly cold, that far up) atmosphere and accessible via airlock. Most of the crew's activities would be in the maintenance area, replacing broken or worn-out equipment and adding new/upgraded gear.
It might be possible to lease space onboard such a platform -- if the Russians can sell trips to the ISS at $20M each, a week/month aboard a stratospheric platform could be offered for a whole lot less and still be emminently profitable. No zero-G, but then you would also miss the physically degrading aspects of weightlessness as well. You would stil get the black sky of space above you, and the curvature of the Earth below. And lifeboat departures in the event of a catastrophe onboard (hydrogen fire, meteor strike, missile attack) are much simpler (though not trivial) when you don't have to decelerate from orbital velocities.
Is it economically feasible? If you look at the revenues of telecom and satellite TV companies, you quickly arrive at revenue upwards of $50B annually (at least here in the US). Even assuming costs of $10B or so to develop and launch it, and reasonable operational expenses (I'll guess at about $1B per year), I think a payback within a year is virtually guaranteed. There are considerable savings in not having to deal with a grid of wires/fiber, and in consolidating all your transmission facilities in one place, with zero energy expenses.
Broadband via donkeys?
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
Another source of UFOs for people to complain about. I mean, how do we know they aren't coming up with this whole plan to just cover up the hovering ships of our new alien overlords? I mean really! We should all start constructing heavy duty tin foil hats, with additional plating up top to protect from this high-altitude threat!!!
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
(The Beatles)
I can see it now. There will be a hot spot at every baseball and football game.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.