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."

Comments

Re:And... what? How much will this cost?

[Thorin001]

There wasn't a price on the equipment itself, but they seem to expect that it will "fall in a lake or get run over by a truck" so it can't be too expensive. However, they mention paying a bounty in order to get people to return the equipment, that could get rather expensive after a while.

Re:The summary seems... off.

[Anonymous Coward]

So they'll have to redeploy every 24 hours?

Yes, this would be a continuous process of launching balloons and retrieving the electronics after the balloons drift away or burst. But reading the article would have answered that for you.

Re:And... what? How much will this cost?

[MindStalker]

Well the numbers don't work out exactly that way. The figure comes from the fact that in south-dakota it would take 1,100 tower to cover the state, instead they are using 3 ballons. The state is very rural. You can be sure that 3 ballons would not be nearly enough if placed over an urban area, simply because while you would have the coverage area of NY with maybe 5 ballons, you simple couldn't handle the millions of calls with so few ballons.

Either way in call volume one of these ballons may not even handle as much as a single tower and arn't attached to a hardline. But for rural areas were a tower simply does not make sense these ballons are a great idea.

Re:Extend wireless broadband to the last mile

[polaughlin]

According to the article, they'll be floating up to 20 miles above the earth, well above commercial airliner pathways. And I'm guess they'd be in touch with some type of air traffic control for their ascent.

Re:Landing Zones

[vertinox]

I can just see these balloons falling in some interesting places like some guy driving 80mph down a highway and hitting one of them.

Have you been to North Dakota?

If someone falls out of the sky in either of those states, you've got a 99.9999% of hitting empty space.

The other 0.0001% will involve you hitting a cow or maybe a pheasant bird ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dakota

Population
  - Total (2000)
  - Density Ranked 47th
642 200
3.59/km (47th)

Yeah, I spent more time visiting South Dakota, but they both pretty much have seas worth of open spaces... This kind of idea would probaly work, because most peoples closest neighbors might be 10-30 miles away. In towns its a bit different though, but if wide area coverage is what you are looking for, these baloons are actually a good idea for these areas.