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The Mobile Internet You'll Be Using In 10 Years
mr sanjeev writes "After being plagued with project overruns and a scaling back of the final system, the US military's next-generation satellite communications network is another step closer to reality, with completion of the payload module for the third and final Advanced Extremely High Frequency (EHF) satellite ... If GPS and remote imaging (think Google Earth) have proven anything, it is that technology initially developed for military purposes, and extremely expensive for initial civil use, will eventually reach the point where it forms part of our daily lives without us ever being conscious of the massive investment to get to that point."
Really, any new technology is good - we will weed out the bad ideas, keep the good. Ideally, we will take the best from each and mix it together, producing a superior solution to anything else.
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Quote: "it forms part of our daily lives without us ever being conscious of the massive investment to get to that point."
"Not conscious", my ass. Military investment makes up a very large part of our tax and trade burden, and many of us are conscious as hell of how much it costs. If the research did not eventually get into civilian hands, there would be hell to pay.
I am not saying it's not worth it... just that unlike the OP, I pay attention.
We may live in the armpit of freedom right now, but there is no doubt that our government funded initiatives like this have provided more fruit to the world than any other nation is hundreds of years. Now lets win back our freedom of speech and assembly!
That would bring about a few questions. How many would that require just to cover the entire United States? You state that it would be cheaper. How much do these autonomous drones cost a piece? What about the cost in terms of energy to keep charging and relaunching? What if they were to crash? With so many required to cover the entire US or Metropolitan areas surely some would come down and certainly harm someone. Just something to think about. I agree that this would make more sense, but before jumping on the bandwagon, think it out.
I realize how expensive this technology is every time I have to pay taxes.
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The scale is much lesser, and the technology much less cool, but we get the same thing where I work. There's a development lifecycle of a couple of years, and someone somewhere in "Management" decided that they'd go with a Waterfall model of development, where our spec is TOTALLY fixed in stone about 2 years before we release the product. Every product is therefore close to 2 years behind where it really should be. Right now, this also applies to all of our competition (they're all equally as dumb as we are in that regard), so it's not hurting us too much, but I recently gave a presentation to them about how we effectively implement a better development model (I was aiming at a variant of Agile that's tailored to our business) so we can (at least until the competition catch on) be effectively two years ahead of our competition. Perhaps the US Navy should re-consider their design processes also...
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The idea behind autonomous high altitude drones is they stay up indefinitely (barring parts breaking) by using solar panels to produce and store enough energy to stay aloft. Today we have thousands of flights a day using much more massive aircraft, I don't think a few extra ultralight drones are a significant increase in the risk associated with aircraft.
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The problem isn't so much the design lifecycle, it's the cost of upgrades. When you have to essentially rebuild an entire ship to retool the comm infrastructure that's a hell of a lot of cost. They design a hull to sail for 50 years, but the ship will typically have to be refitted multiple time during that span to keep up with newer technology costing several times the initial cost to build it and keeping it out of service for years in total.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
"without us ever being conscious of the massive investment to get to that point"
I guarantee you that the countries that were used as an excuse to wage war are very conscious of it too.
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Yes, and that's also the reason why there should be a space program. Sadly though, many people nowadays don't see it that way. They think that reaching for the stars is "impractical" when we have so many problems here at ground level. But money spent this way, even in military endeavors, is *never* wasted. Eventually it reaches everyone in some way or another.
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The EHF satellites are great for what they've been designed to do, deliver bandwidth to 10,000's users over a large area of the earth, but that isn't what most consumers need.
They need things that will work in urban canyons and can cope with 10,000's of users within a few square miles. This is much better served by local radio masts than satellite systems.
The future of mobile internet is 3G and WiMAX and its rivals, and its already here.
Apparently, you haven't been to Scandinavia or Ireland or even former Yugoslavia lately.
If you think the US is going to be able to look down on "third-world" countries much longer, you haven't been reading the papers.
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MILSTAR and the follow on program AEHF are designed to provide secure, reliable, and protected communications. Bandwidth was not the main goal. Commercial geo satellites offer considerable more bandwidth, flexibility, and cost savings.
MILSTAR is a relic of the Cold War and has many shortcomings. It was designed to maintain military and key leadership communications in a ballistic missile (nukes) exchange with Russia. When the Cold War ended the program had to âoereinventâ itself many times over to justify its existence and continued funding. The GAO has released many scathing reviews about MILSTAR and AEHF. It fails to meet its stated requirements and has enormous cost overruns. Us mere civilians would be wise to avoid this military technology :)
http://www.gao.gov/archive/1999/ns99002.pdf
http://archive.gao.gov/d4t4/130589.pdf
http://archive.gao.gov/d32t10/146911.pdf
In summary of the GAO report, MILSTAR & AEHF are a POS!
Yes, AEHF and the old MILSTAR are geo-syn which is a little over 22,000 miles out. You wouldn't use it for local comm. AEHF falls under the "specialized" communications and is meant to be anti-jam, survivable and secure. It allows new cypto keys (OTAR) to be sent, has spot beams so you can "ignore" the spoofing from the enemy nearby, and would be able to communicate through a nuclear "event" (survivable). This isn't to be used to just send an email to a buddy stateside. For anyone interested, there's 3 bands of military comm birds. Narrowband, which is UHF/UHF F/O, wideband, which is DSCS, and then "specialized", which is MILSTAR/AEHF. Each has it's own advantages and uses, in addition to the comm leased from foreign governemts and civilian comm birds.