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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)
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.
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)
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...
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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.
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]
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
Hasn't this idea... been floating around for a while?
Regards, Phil
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
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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.
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.rouges sends a homebrew drone
There aren't any homebrew drones at 79,000 feet. There won't be any homebrew drones at that altitude in the foreseeable future (aside from the odd ex-dot-com billionaire hobbyist with a benign ballistic rocket.) This is the very top of the mesosphere. The only entities that operate in this regime are nation-state militaries, and it's non-trivial even for them. If any such nation is busy shooting down your balloons you'll have other things on your mind, so it's not a problem.
Anyhow, for consumer broadband the whole idea is nonsense. People won't pay the cost necessary to maintain the system. Militaries and emergency services might appreciate the means to blanket an area with secure broadband, however. Relaying real-time telemetry, audio and video is hard in a combat zone. Bandwidth was a major problem for the US military in both gulf conflicts.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Latest implementation of RFC 1149 ?
Or, should that be, "Aviation Carriers"?
I think they meant 60Km radius which would equate to 120Km diameter.
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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
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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."
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.
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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.