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Google Interested in Wireless Bandwidth Balloons
An anonymous reader writes "Google is reportedly looking into investing in or buying a company called Space Data, which provides wireless voice and data services to remote areas with a fleet of weather balloons fitted with transceivers." My mind is sorta tripping over how something like this could work, but I gotta admit that the idea is really cool.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
The beginning of the end for ISPs.
The internet will eventually become a self propagating mesh network. (Case and point: One laptop per child)
I have a BB Gun.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I love Google as much as the next slashdotter, but I have to wonder where they're going with this. Android, the dark fiber, Wifi balloons, etc. It doesn't really tie into advertising.
The stock market has stopped believing Google's undisciplined business model will be that profitable and driven the stock price down considerably.
We all know what happens when 99 red balloons are floating in the summer sky.
If they're carrying data, well, so much the worse...
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
That's an awful waste of resources not to mention what happens if someone is transmitting a signal when the balloon in your area pops? How much does all this constant launching and recovering cost compared to just putting in a tower despite the remoteness?
I can see using these balloons for limited times, such as emergencies, or battlefield conditions where there are no cell towers (as the article intimates) but for every day use? I don't think so.
And what is this 'floating gently back down to earth' stuff? Unless they have a parachute, the tranceiver will not be floating gently back down to earth when the balloon pops. It will be plummeting.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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How do they keep people from stealing the balloons and thusly the transceivers?
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It seems that if this company simply tethered their balloons to the ground, they could minimize losses, and thus could afford to deploy far more robust balloons, which could last significantly longer than 24 hours. If a balloon exceeds its life span, sustains damage, or requires maintenance or updates to its payload, it could simply be reeled in as a replacement is reeled out.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
My mind is sorta tripping over how something like this could work, but I gotta admit that the idea is really cool.
I think you have very little imagination
I could see this working if you run, say, a WAP up with a balloon and use an ethernet cable as a balloon string, but floating them around and having them "float" (ha ha) back down to earth every 24 hours and trusting that someone'll actually see them (as compared to running them over with a tractor in a huge field of what-have-you), AND return them, seems unworkable.
When people's Android cellphones are reporting their every move via a network of wi-fi weather baloons, Google will have totally cornered the market of Paranoid Schitzophrenic consumers.
I wonder how Google plans to deal with the rising cost of helium?
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/14/0219246&from=rss
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
From a cute sci-fi sort of view it's "neat-o", but wildly unpractical.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
This reminds me of RFC 1149.
Featuring an entire small town wearing tinfoil coated trucker caps to hide from those evil, thought reading, transceivers. Cue those blurry night vision shots and man in the rubber Grey mask.
Google's stock price is inflated so they need to do stuff like this to satisfy the high forward P/E ratio.
Soon, they'll probably have to get into the hardware biz and compete with companies like Sun, IBM, Apple.
Hmm that brings up the prospect of high end linux laptops, mp3 players, gaming devices, and HDTV's from Google to compete. It could happen. They'll need a top dog designer though.
Let me be the first to suggest:
"Skynet"
well the balloons are not the only thing full of hot air, just look at Google's stock for last year
These weather balloons remind me of a Digital Donkey. http://virtudyne.com/
Your dead on.
We have no need for the phone co.
With even the cheapest base station hardware, helium, balloon (at say, $5000 per unit), costs would exceed $14.6M/year per site.
This does not include the labor to continuously manufacturer, transport, and launch equipment.
At a rate of $50/month per subscriber, you would need about 25,000 to break even on base station--hardware alone. This does not include the uplink facility, bandwidth costs, and business administration costs.
I have seen quite a few telemetry balloon launches and return of balloon hardware has never happened even once. Balloons seem fall in the most remote areas, getting caught in trees, landing in the ocean, etc. If a human ever encounters the hardware, they certainly are not very honest about returning it. Even at a modest recovery rate of 1%-5%, it wouldnt be worth the trouble. This sounds like a major environmental hazard too.
Whoever wrote this business plan is on crack. $15 million a year for the equivalent of 14 base stations?! In a rural area? Instead of using grain silos?
The FAA has quite a few requirements for balloons, including a) payload to have a parachute apon balloon failure b) radar reflectors so ground controllers and aircraft can see them c) remote "self destruct system" to release balloon, among others.
Hmm. I can't help wondering how something that's worth $100 per day to google isn't worth the finder keeping forever.
The colour of the balloons is just an artefact of the translation from the song's original German where they were just "99 Luftballons" (actually the German lyrics tell a much better story as the translation changes a lot). So the world is over whatever colour they make them.
My mind is sorta tripping over how something like this could work, but I gotta admit that the idea is really cool.
Yo! You be trippin' about dis sheeit, but you not be unnerstandin' how fuckin' moronic it make you be lookin', foo. Word.
I speak redneck fluently, too, y'all. It ain't gonna make nobody thank I'm booklarned neither.
The summary was so, shall we say, "unlearned" that I doubt far too seriously that if someone with the lack of communication skills exhibited by the anonymous submitter submitted it, then it can't be worth reading. Did this fellow ever make it past the 8th grade?
The harder you try to be cool, the more uncool you look. Cool people don't try. Just submit the damned story in the English you learned in school, or risk being thought not only a fool but a poser as well.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
According to a recent poll, 78% of Slashdot comments contain simple words that are spelled incorrectly.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Mesh networks are interesting, but a wireless one that would be required would have way too many hops. Then the congestion on each hop would be high too.
Ping rates would go down the tubes.
Microsoft announces the acquisition of Daisy Outdoor Products (BB guns) in order to head off Google.
which is totally what she said
If the business model was completely viable, they would already be out there taking over the market, making money. Google isn't interested because its a viable option they can immediately turn around and profit. They are interested because its a non-traditional approach to a common problem. That is what google is about -- thinking differently (sorry Apple!).
Techdirt claims it (probably) ain't so.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
These polls don't have a Cowboy Neal option.
It's been said that every one's a super hero - every one's a Captain Kirk!
Bow-ties are cool.
I cant put tags. Someone please put 'skynet' tag ;) Those tags are hilarious!
At least if Google loses contact with the balloon, it's still in the earth's atmosphere and won't necessarily need missiles to shoot it down, but merely a sniper rifle would suffice
uh, why would this be better?
..plus you can mount all
assuming you want to limit yourself to line of site RF
(for a bunch of reasons) then what's wrong with ground based
towers?
Depending on wind/weather issues, I would think you could
even build structures out of wood.
Guyed towers can reduce the steel requirements a lot though,
with sections being able to be carried by humans or animals.
100 ft guyed towers are pretty cheap to erect. Probably less
than $5000. Don't need much concrete either.
Or take advantage of topography (hills)
Here's an analysis of height requirements vs distance
(frenel distance issues etc)
http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3762/RM3762.chap5.html
100 ft tower can probably get you a 20 mile link at 5Ghz no problem.
10 of them to go 200 miles.
your local repeaters.
...how a mesh network really works... (or actually stops working), once you get past a few hops away from a backbone injection node. In a mesh, every hop away from you halves the bandwidth and doubles the latency. Four hops away and you're down to 1/16 of the bandwidth of each node, and 16-fold the latency. This is the dirty little secret all the mesh hardware companies didn't want cities to know as they were selling them the Muni-wifi boondoggle. Meshing a large area like a city only works when you can insert a backbone connection/backhaul about every 3 or 4 hops, else your effective thruput between any two arbitrary points on the mesh goes down the crapper.
Reaches new hieghts with Google.
Does anyone know what happened to the plans from Sanswire? This sounded more feasible to me.
A google boss walks in on a google employee playing Balloon Fight on a NES emulator Google boss: What's this? Playing on your 20% time?? Busted employee: Errr... well... it's research! We could buy a balloon company and rule the wifi world. Google boss: Fantastic idea Johnson! Also, let us buy some fishermen to make sure those pesky fishes don't eat our balloons! Employee: ....riiiight...
boss: To the buying room!!!
Who ordered the beowulf cluster of bandwidth?
I have an idea - why dont the tether the ballons to a cell tower! LMFAO!
This is a possible reality.
http://www.worldskycat.com/markets/skycom.html
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
!HAVEFUN!
http://www.aerosml.com/galleryML866.htm
http://www.dezeen.com/2007/12/11/aeroscraft-ml866/
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4242974.html
http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/systems/haa.htm
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
From the article: Recovery missions can get intense. Workers have had to pluck transceivers out of trees in Louisiana, rappel down rocky cliffs in Arizona, trudge through swamps and kayak across ponds. Space Data pays them $100 per transceiver recovered.
"These things can fall anywhere," says Chip Kyner of San Antonio, who once hiked seven miles before finding the transmitter he was looking for. The final mile was in pitch darkness.
"It wasn't worth the $100," he says, "but it's a neat story."
What happens to this scheme when your recovery teams start demanding hourly wages, mileage and hazard pay?
I hear talk of cheaper cell phone service. But does the rural customer see faster, cheaper or less restricted Internet service then he can get from dial-up or satellite?
Oh well, this was just some unrefined extrapollation... Never mind, I forgot where I was going with this.
OK, I'm off to work on my Pollitzer Prize piece.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
These airships could serve multiple purposes (among many others I'm sure Google's clever folks could come up with):
- Photography for Google Maps.
- Airvertising as another revenue source.
- Weather.
No one has posted http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
IP over Avian Carriers?
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What a lot of people are missing is that this is already being done by a company that has a networth of 70+ million, national defense and oil contracts, and rakes in a tidy profit every year. I visited the company in question's corporate site and did some research on them. They recently won contracts from the Air Force that google had also bid on. This is often a catalyst that leads to a large company buying a smaller one. There isn't a lot of evidence for google buying out Space Data. I just wanted to point out that they are already succesfully using weather balloons in the corporate and military sectors this would just be a push to residential uses.