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."

Comments

I'm betting on balloons

[justthinkit]

Balloons make more sense, don't they?

Re:I'm betting on balloons

[quenda]

For 98% of the population, towers as used currently make even more sense.
Ground-based cellular systems can pack close together in cities, and spread out in the suburbs and rural areas.
These drones are stuck at high altitude, so except for remote areas they are wasting bandwidth and battery life on the ground.
Drones might be useful for extra large LTE cells in northern Canada or central Australia. Perhaps replace Iridium.

Must be a slow news for nerds day.

Re:I'm betting on balloons

[AchilleTalon]

Have you ever seen a hurricane or a tropical storm? It means the Internet will be down during these critical events when it is often most needed. That is the reason they are talking about 13 miles altitude drones and not just zeppelins. The altitude record for a zeppelin is 7.6 km or 4.7 miles. Large hurricanes can reach an altitude of 50 000 feet or 9.5 miles or 15.25 km. Zeppelins couldn't clear a large hurricane.

Re:I'm betting on balloons

[swillden]

Have you ever seen a hurricane or a tropical storm? It means the Internet will be down during these critical events when it is often most needed. That is the reason they are talking about 13 miles altitude drones and not just zeppelins. The altitude record for a zeppelin is 7.6 km or 4.7 miles. Large hurricanes can reach an altitude of 50 000 feet or 9.5 miles or 15.25 km. Zeppelins couldn't clear a large hurricane.

The balloons Google is experimenting with do reach the stratosphere. 20 km altitude.

Re:I'm betting on balloons

[whyAreAllNicksTaken]

The altitude record for a zeppelin is 7.6 km or 4.7 miles. Large hurricanes can reach an altitude of 50 000 feet or 9.5 miles or 15.25 km. Zeppelins couldn't clear a large hurricane.

All balloons are not "zeppelins". High altitude balloons can reach 32 km.

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

Here is one that can reach between 29km and 32 km you can buy today for $60.

http://www.highaltitudescience...

I would agree that drones are preferable, but we do have better balloons that we did in the 1890's

Re:I'm betting on balloons

[dargaud]

I mountain areas coverage is very spotty, even in densely populated mountains like the Alps: in deep twisted valleys you have to install too many antennas, and north faces (in the northern hemisphere) impede the use of geosync satellites by blocking line-of-sight. And there's never an irridium above you when you are in a valley. When I was in Himalaya we had a chart of time windows when satellites were above us and we could make quick calls or SMS. Balloons/drones can improve on that.

Re:I'm betting on balloons

[quenda]

OK, I can see that in mountainous areas one drone can replace many towers to give line of sight.
But the drone still needs to be near overhead, so will not cover a massive area like an Irridium satellite.

And a bunch of mass-produced solar-powered, LOS microwave-link meshed hilltop cells will likely still be easier than one mega-drone.
And safer.

Re:I'm betting on balloons

[justaguy516]

There was an idea like this floated in the 1990s, called Strato station or something. Balloons at 80km altitude (in the stratosphere) providing coverage. I seem to remember that Loral and Alenia Spaziale were both involved to some extent. It was abandoned because it is too difficult to keep balloons static (even at that altitude) and this would need expensive tracking antennae on the ground (in the 1990s digital beamforming was simply not available for commercial use). Anybody else remember this? It was around the time when the whole world (including Microsoft, remember Teledesic?) was planning to do 'internet in the sky' kind of things.

If only

[phantomfive]

Not much particularly interesting in the article, the primary thing missing is a financial analysis showing drones are cheaper than towers or really better in any way; but the article is a treasure trove of beautifully (stupid?) quotes.

"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

Re:Solar powered drones

[pushing-robot]

The zombie drones attack.

Wired Access Will Still Be Standard

[logicnazi]

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).