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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.
Is there a setting somewhere to limit displayed post length I haven't found yet?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I believe that floating places on the wind is part of the plan. When last I read about Project Loon, they were taking advantage of the wind blowing different directions at different altitudes and causing the balloons to adjust their altitude so as to travel in a big loop, over and over again.
There aren't too many "60,000 feet" (in the /. summary) long balloon tethers out there. That's just shy of 12 miles (18 km).
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 no practical reason you couldn't fill unmanned high altitude balloons with hydrogen.