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Balloon Based Wireless Floated
AmigaAvenger writes "It was recently announced by Yahoo news that the Arizona based company Extend America will be testing high altitude balloon service over North Dakota to handle the duties of cell phone towers. Three balloons will be able to take the place of 1,100 cell phone towers, and will remain aloft for 24 hours. Plans call for the service to be sold wholesale to existing wireless carriers, and will include both voice and data service."
First thing, why would they spend so much money on such hardware to power this when the equipment could be damaged in the air, and second, how long daily would people have to deal with downtime if these balloons are their only way to connect?
So they'll have to redeploy every 24 hours?
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So what happens during a windy, rainy storm when cell phone use is highly important for emergencies.
Once a balloon leaves the state, its toaster-size communications pod would jettison, deploy a parachute and fall to earth, where it would signal its position.
"We'd pay some guy a bounty, put in a new battery pack and send it off again," Knoblach said. Schafer said the repeater could be used indefinitely "unless it lands in a lake or gets run over by a truck."
So what happens if it HITS a truck? Or a small child?
pat o.
After all the Hindenburg and her brother zeppelins were meant to ferry not only passengers but mail. Call this the next generation of airship communications, although using balloons. I had even thought of this a few years back; mount cell transponder equipment on blimps and have them hover over populated areas to act as relays for mobile phones and wireless Internet.
But if you're going to go to the degree of high altitude balloons, why stop there? Satellites would be the ultimate answer. Ask Arthur C. Clarke. A globe-girdling satellite network along the lines of GPS but carrying voice and data. I know, satellite phones are big and clunky, but so were cell phones at one time. It's possible to get a satellite phone right now, though I doubt they are going to be as cheap as cell phones for a while.
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Sounds very good. Just 3 balloons taking the place of 1100 wireless towers sounds great. I would think they could provide wireless broadband. One question, if they're floating in the Stratosphere, wont there be a chance of mid-air collision with jets?
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This is great... One of these balloons gets popped by a rare super-high-altitude pheasant and crashes to earth, and crashlands in Squeallikeapigboy, Mississipi.
Long story short: balloon gets mistaken for UFO, pheasant gets mistaken for intelligent alien life.
(I bet those Roswell aliens are rolling in their graves right now)
"Three balloons will be able to take the place of 1,100 cell phone towers, and will remain aloft for 24 hours. "
My guess is this is a test run. If the baloons aren't able to stay up for more than a day it would be a headahce to constantly deploy them. It would be nice to remove 1100 towers that easy. I've heard that a tower can cont in excess of $1M.
Even if the baloons were pricy, it would take a lot of failures to cost as much as the towers do. If you could keep them up for a week to a month and only needed 3 baloons then I would have about 30 baloons available.
I would have 6 in the air at any one time. I would have standby crews ready to launch new baloons at a moments notice. That would ensure connectivity, redundancy, and still likely be cheaper than the current system. It would also provide extra capacity in case a disaster happened.
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I mean, balloons to float expensive electronics.
First, aircraft, think of the aircraft.
Second, how much maintenance will this require. I don't think mankind has invented a system where gas can remain in an enclosed cavity for an extended period of time without expelling in some way ( or exploding ). If this balloon has to be pulled down every week or month to top it up with gas, will people generally like having their service interrupted frequently? This is opposed to a a fixed metal tower that doesn't need regular maintenance (can last for years without it). Also, too much maintenance will drive up operation costs making it not feasible (look at all them wind power generators in California, 2/3rds of them are down and being dismantled because the maintenance to keep them running became astronomical and time consuming).
Third, how safe is this? Something tethered to essentially a string will probably be easier to sabotage, or be destroyed because of natural disaster. Just need a good pair of wire cutters and you have disrupted communications for thousands of people.
Fourthly, has anyone looked at the whether patterns? Whether its by global warming or some natural cycle of global weather change, weather is becoming more violent and erratic over the last decade. Will this be an issue where the balloon is rated for category 3 storms, but gets hit by a category 5 storm, snaps off, and kills a family in their mobile home out in Arkansas?
As much as it might be cheaper and easier to float some expensive electronics up in high altitude, having something requiring too much maintenance, too unsafe, and too easy to sabotage just isn't practical.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
We've got rolling hills and valleys that prevent short-to-medium towers (less than 250 ft.) from making a decent connection, lots of trees to help block signals, and not enough people to justify building tall towers. A lot of the landlines have 1970's equipment (24 Kbps is what I'm getting right now, sometimes it's worse), and no carrier wants to bring in cable or dsl (they say that we won't live long enough to see THEM bring it out here.)
I'm only able to access streaming media/audio if I travel 20 miles into town, and get on the computers at school, and then I'm restricted by the schools' proxy servers, and the ability to store files/data on portable media (no burners in the machines).
The ONLY option available is satellite internet, which is very expensive to setup and run and subject to a high rate of link failure (according to a friendly installer). We're a small captive market with no viable options, in the middle of the US. We NEED this. The few people I've talked to about this said that it would be great, but if the balloons are too low all the inbred assholes around here would think they were for target practice!
When you want something built, come see me. If you want correct grammar and spelling, get a F*ing liberal arts student.
I think that Stratellites would be better, when they are finally deployed.
One Stratellite will cover 100,000 square miles.
They remain aloft for months at a time, when it finally does need service another is sent up beside it, they electronically transfer control to the new one, and the other descends for servicing.
They are above the winds, airplanes, etc, and aren't dropping things every 24 hours like the balloons in the article.
I hope they hurry up, I'm ready to subscribe so I can use the same internet connection at home, on the road, and at my cabin.
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most of the comments ask questions that are answered in TFA.
Why is reading comprehension so bad?
Because they're waiting for the movie.
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there is another reason for people to say i sound high on the phone *grin*
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