Weather Balloons To Provide Broadband In Africa

An anonymous reader writes "Two African entrepreneurs have secured exclusive access to market near-space technology — developed by Space Data, an American telecommunications company — throughout Africa. The technology raises hydrogen-filled weather balloons to 80,000 — 100,000 feet, which individuals contact via modems. The balloons, in turn, serve as satellite substitutes which can connect Africans to broadband Internet. 'Network operation centers are located close to a fiber optic cable — say, in Lagos or Accra — and a signal is sent back and forth to the [balloon] in near space,' says one of the entrepreneurs, Timothy Anyasi. The technology will also allow mobile phone operators to offer wireless modems to customers."

Comments

They'll have these in England soon

[ickleberry]

but with CCTV cameras rather than broadband

Re:They'll have these in England soon

[ShieldW0lf]

It's the US company that getting exclusive rights to spy on broadband in Africa. At least your CCTV cameras are domestic...

Only one accessible site though

[courteaudotbiz]

weather.com

IRC

[linuxg0d]

[1131] Disconnected: Balloon Service Interrupted. Try again later.

Re:Disaster?

[T Murphy]

So what happens then when these untethered balloons are floating up into the jet stream and a Airbus or 747 doesn't pick it up on radar

causing an explosion and bringing down 400 souls to their death

Looks like you've answered your own question there. I just hope I'm not on that plane.

Re:This will be nice

[evilviper]

Why do you want to over engineer things? A balloon is easy to make, cheap to make and can stay up for days.

Perhaps because: "The balloons come down every 24 hours due to the limitations of battery life -- and to keep them from floating into territories that don't subscribe to the service. "You're looking at a wide geographic area -- there's a wide jet stream at near space"

BTW, you'll NEVER GUESS where that quote came from... NEVER!