Slashdot Mirror
Google Project Loon Balloons To Blanket Indonesia With Internet (thestar.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Google's Project Loon is set to deliver high-speed internet access to more than 100 million Indonesians. The Project Loon program will fly clusters of balloons as high as 60,000 feet above Earth to transmit high-speed Internet signals down to Earth at LTE speeds. Google has been working with mobile network operators; XL Axiata, Telkomsel, and Indosat. “The emotional distance of the world is shrinking, thanks to the communications we enjoy today,” said Sergey Brin, who oversees the X lab as Alphabet’s president.
Isn't there a helium shortage already?
pretty sure it's not albaphet.
anyways, the stock ticker disagrees even if you spell it properly, GOOGL and GOOG.. the alphabet remix of the name was due to them having the domain pretty much and in all practicality has ZERO EFFECT ON FUCKING ANYTHING, so it's better if journos don't start acting like they're different companies since they are the one and the same.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Yes hopefully some day Google will bring broadband to the United States.
We can only hope.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Is there a setting somewhere to limit displayed post length I haven't found yet?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Won't they just float away on the wind?
Or are they tied down like that radar blimp that broke free over the east coast the other day.
Still experimental but I am happy to do what I can to help in testing it :-)
Indonesia cell coverage for voice and data is pretty spotty. LTE does exist but mostly you get 3G on and off. It is always getting better, but it is a big place with rugged terrain built on volcanoes.
In the major metros you do better coverage, but it is far from blanket coverage even when driving through the capitol city of Jakarta much less the smaller villages. The further east you go the less infrastructure there is to be found. Java, Bali and Lombok (the western side anyway) all have spotty coverage. Further east it gets kinda forgotten. Not much in the way of high-speed internet or broadband out there at the moment.
Haven't been to Papau or Flores so maybe it gets better far to the east.
So I think project Loon could definitely be a piece of the puzzle there.
It's called: "Comment byte limit"
You can find it here:
https://slashdot.org/my/commen...
Slashcode is a real fucked-up zombie mess of 5 layers of cruft, these days. You don't realize how painful it is, until you spend a few weeks on Pipedot, then curse non-stop when you come back here.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I previously looked-up high altitude balloons, and found figures of about $1 million every launch, with them only staying airborne maybe a week at a time.
What's more, this isn't the middle of nowhere. TFA says Indonesia already has a widespread cellular telephone infrastructure:
"in Indonesia, where there the number of mobile phones â" about 319 million â" outnumber people. But most of those phones donâ(TM)t connect to the Internet because users canâ(TM)t afford data plans"
And with the high ongoing costs of balloons, it seems that Google's toy will quickly cost more than conventional infrastructure upgrades already started:
"Telkom is building a fiber optic system connecting the provinces of Maluku and Papua worth hundreds of millions of dollars."
I'd call Elon Musk's plan (WorldVu/OneWeb/L5) with lots of LEO satellites infinitely more practical and viable:
http://pipedot.org/story/2014-...
Personally, I don't see why one-way datacasting hasn't gained some popularity. Whether via local TV, AM/MW radio, or worldwide coverage with shortwave radio. It would cost next to nothing to modulate a data signal underneath the audio, and just start beaming the (compressed) full text of Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, and any other free content made available. Receivers would just need to add SD card slots, and include a very low-end processor (or piggyback on an existing DSP).
While long overdue, VOA has been trying it out with their Radiogram test program the past couple years:
http://voaradiogram.net/
It isn't what Google/Facebook want, as they can't datamine and sell ads on one-way broadcasts targeting these dirt-poor folks, it would vastly improve life for everyone off-the-grid and unable to afford satellite internet service.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"sure there's a few islands and it's pretty big geographically"
Something tells me this AC has never set foot in Indonesia. In reality there are about 6,000 inhabited islands out of a total of 17,508, and end-to-end the country stretches 3,977 miles.
When you scratch the 4G wireless and fibre optics surface, the telecommunications sector here is a shambles. Even in Jakarta, whether or not you can get cable Internet depends on which side of the street you live - the original franchise was for a broad coverage of business and living areas, but the reality is that almost all the quality access is restricted to a handfull of prestige business zones and a smattering of upmarket (and high-priced) residential developments.
The new kid on the block is 4G wireless access, but even in Jakarta coverage is so patchy it's frustratingly inadequate - and a lot of domestic Internet access is still through good old copper telephone wires. Google balloons are just so much pie in the sky, a sticking-plaster solution for the country's systemic communications problems.
There's 100 million unconnected computers in Indonesia? And will these things still fly with all that smoke and ash in the air?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
MRI uses a lot of Helium to cool its powerful magnets, and the widespread use of MRI are gobbling up the supply of Helium
Furthermore, only a tiny fraction of Helium has been harvested while most of the Helium are routinely thrown away into the atmosphere along with the burn off of benzene and other aromatic compounds on drilling rigs
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
It's called: "Comment byte limit"
So all I need to do
to annoy people
is split my comment up
onto several lines
so it still takes up
a lot space
without taking up
a lot bytes.
You'd think
with Slashdot's
amazing command
of Javascript
that they could implement
a true line limit
with a bit of DOM
modification,
if nothing else.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Linefeeds take up bytes, too. Especially after each one gets turned into a <p> or <br>.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I don't know what it is about Indonesia, but we have to block that country and prevent people from it from using our services. In our case all people joining from that country are doing it to use stolen credit cards and stolen paypal accounts. It's too bad really.
You can't handle the truth.
"The emotional distance of the world is shrinking, thanks to the communications we enjoy today"
OK, that made me puke in my mouth just a bit. What a complete pile of marketing drek.
Anyway of more interest when I heard of the project a few days ago, was how are these things powered? I assume they are solar... However I always figured the power necessary to transmit with enough power to be useful for anything would be well beyond what would be available through simple solar cells.
I really have little idea how LTE type signal is generated or broadcast, but I guess I have to assume that they still achieve great range with little power??? Anyone know how this works or what the values we are talking about?