Slashdot Mirror
Internet Broadband Through High-altitude Drones
mwagner writes: Skynet is coming. But not like in the movie: The future of communications is high-altitude solar-powered drones, flying 13 miles above the ground, running microwave wireless equipment, delivering broadband to the whole planet. The articles predicts this technology will replace satellites, fiber, and copper, and fundamentally change the broadband industry. The author predicts a timescale of roughly 20 years — the same amount of time between Arthur C. Clarke predicting geosynchronous satellites and their reality as a commercial business. "Several important technology milestones need to be reached along the way. The drones that will make up Skynet have a lot more in common with satellites than the flippy-flappy helicopter drone thingies that the popular press is fixated on right now. They're really effing BIG, for one thing. And, like satellites, they go up, and stay up, pretty much indefinitely. For that to happen, we need two things: lighter, higher-capacity wireless gear; and reliable, hyper-efficient solar tech."
Balloons make more sense, don't they?
I come here for the love
"some work still needs to be done on the physics....[but] certainly not anything beyond the reach of hard-working American (or Chinese, or Chinese-American) engineering types."
"solar tech (which, let’s be honest, has all been a bit shit until now) "
"As usual, the "media" have completely and utterly missed this story"
an extra allocation of "stupid points" go to the editors of Wired Magazine .....Wiretards
Wired Magazine gets to continue being the authority on the Internet of Things That Don’t Matter
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yes, balloons pop, but mechanical systems fail or jam (due to foreign matter).
Because you don't have thermals at 13 miles altitude and at several thousand feet you can encounter severe weather conditions pretty often which would nail down your entire network for many hours or even days.
Achille Talon
Hop!
So what happens at night?
Sorry, but wires will always have substantially greater bandwidth. If for no other reason than you can run one (or even several) wires into each structure and get at least as much bandwidth as is shared over a wide area by the plane.
Since bandwidth use will no doubt continue to increase by the time we have these giant broadband stationary planes everyone will want too much bandwidth to make them a reasonable competitor for fiber (and multiplexing will move down market into the home eventually).
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
it only takes an idiot with a 'torrent running to suck up the bandwidth. A real smart idea this is not.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Obviously the problem with baloons is they blow away. But we could mitigate the weight so that these drones almost float on their own and use less energy to stay up. We might even use devices that work like submarines and pump the hellium or hydrogen back into pressurized compartments so that the temperature differences can be compensated for between night and day or even design the drones to glide back towards a location before inflating the baloon portion of the device.
Force the CableTV companies and telcos to run Fiber and then fix the last mile mess.
Dammit, these companies are making record profits. They can get off their asses and run fiber and fix the last mile Bullshit.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This is literally SkyNet
Why does everyone want to think drones will do everything in the future? Do we actually need this? They really seem like the 21st century equivalent of the flying car. Or perhaps a better example is video phones in 80s sci-fi movies. People just seem to really like the idea, even if time may tell that it will not be nearly as important as is being proposed if it ends up happening at all. So now there is Facetime and Skype and a few things like that, but 99% of all calls occur still in the same old-fashioned voice-only fashion.
Skynet
Could we maybe pick a different name?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I think he is on to something but the path lengths are too long. Presuming the market will stand for nothing less than mobility and at least 4G class data rates, physics requires that radio paths be shorter than he conjectures. Here's why: Mobility means the user device must be powered from batteries and fit in your pocket. It must contain its own antenna. Thus there is a maximum local_storage/delivered_bit ratio available. It costs battery power to deliver a bit of information. Non-line-of-sight paths are entirely too wasteful - witness a cellphone "handy-talky" that can communicate 2000 miles in truly free space not making it into a cell site only 2 miles away in real world conditions. Wireless goes as inverse-square so that's a million-to-one loss, 60 dB. Given one has to use truly LOS (as in laser light), the question of radio path length is answered by looking at the aperture of the antenna in the user's device. It can be thought of as a "bucket" that catches whatever falls on it. The size of the bucket is roughly the physical size of the device. While as frequency goes up (shorter wavelength) antenna gain goes up, so does path loss. The device can only catch as much flux as is falling on it. This is like solar panels - sunlight is about 1 kW/m^2 on earth- try as you might you won't get more energy per unit capture area. If one does the link analysis and applies Shannon's equation, the ONLY solution that works requires paths of, perhaps, a few hundred meters. For this reason, the drones need to be quite low and there need to be more of them. It turns out that this is possible if they are tethered and powered from the ground. http://www.sonic.net/~n6gn/SWT... gives an example of a way to do this while also allowing the (heavy) network hardware to stay on the ground. Demo coming soon. n6gn
There's a ton of useful applications for stuff like this. You wouldn't use it for access in heavily populated areas but there's plenty of usefulness in disaster areas, remote areas and military application. Not every technological development is about getting Netflix to your home faster. A drone that can fly above a hurricane could be available immediately after any natural disaster except for a solar flare. That could make relief efforts a lot easier, by allowing organizations to coordinate without needing satellite equipment or relying on possibly damaged/destroyed infrastructure. In sparsely populated areas, consumer internet access could be provided at a much lower cost than laying down fiber across long distances for a very small number of users that will be obsolete by the time it is finished being laid. By default these areas will have mobile access as an added bonus. In terms of defense, a robust network that can easily recover from an attack is highly valuable. With drones instead of fixed nodes you can very cheaply introduce redundancy into the system. Even if you had to launch a new drone, it's a lot faster than sending a guy out in a truck to find and fix a broken line. This gives you a potentially uninterruptible network.
There is no memory shortage. yes I have heard of XFCE. Go away.
I thought it was the rams?
I could be wrong, but I don't think any propeller driven aircraft has flown to 65,000 feet, or even anywhere close. There is a problem with the low density air that makes props a really poor choice for high altitude. Since a solar jet has huge tech problems as well, I think the concept is stuck with problems that it can't easily solve.
As it turns out, the unofficial propeller driven altitude record is 96,863 feet. So, I guess I'm completely wrong. Nevermind.
And, it was a solar powered plane to boot.
Landlines being taken out would CAUSE cell towers to be also taken out. Cell towers are not magical devices that are fully independent: they require a fiber connection (now) to reach their networks. During an emergency, it is much more likely that the tower is overloaded (radio side) rather than the landline (fiber) connection being dropped, as, typically, those fiber connections are redundant and much more resiliant than the radio side of the tower. The meat of your post is correct, however. ARES is an awesome service that LEAs and ERs can utilize, and it's all done as volunteer work. That group needs more recogition, respect, and thanks.