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Breakthrough in Alphabet's Balloon-Based Internet Project Means It Might Actually Work (recode.net)
Loon, the balloon project that aims to deliver internet to parts of the world that lack reliable connectivity, announced this week that due to advancements in the machine learning software, it can now deploy fewer balloons to provide greater connectivity. From a report on Recode: The Loon balloon project is part of X, the experimental division of Alphabet, Google's parent company. Now in its fourth year, the engineers at Loon say their new machine learning techniques significantly shorten their timeline for launching the project. Initially, engineers proposed that the Loon balloons would float around the globe and that they would have to find a way to keep the balloons a safe traveling distance apart and replace a balloon that drifted from an area that needed connectivity. Now, the team says they've found a way to keep the balloons in a much more concentrated location, thanks to their improved altitude control and navigation system. Loon says that balloons will now make small loops over a land mass, instead of circumnavigating the whole planet.
What could possibly go wrong?
Wor is cool... would be even better if it worked though
Why do these companies keep working on such nonsense? Solar drones, loon balloons, thousands of micro satellites... why not parter with local telecoms and hardwire this shit?
How do we measure that? What does it mean?
Facts have a liberal bias.
Wor never changes.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
improved altitude control and navigation system
sounds more like improved physical capabilities - maybe they got smarter at the same time, but it doesn't matter how smart your loon is if it can't do anything with that knowledge.
I hope to one day get my internet from a baloo
... WOR!
"Is it worth doing?" is the question,
Technically, there is no reason this cannot be made to work. However, financially, it may not be workable.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Wizard of Wor was one of my favorite arcade games back in the early 1980's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_Wor
But it wor! I tell you it wor!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
These new network balloons provide super reliable connec@FA#$F^xF1zNO CARRIER
I loved how all the Google fanbois crowed how Google Fiber was going to put local ISPs out of business because, you know, Google.
So much for that...
The Goodyear Internet Blimp or worse....brought to by "Facebook. We now power everything."
I'd like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as wor, is in fact actually Wor/k, or as I've taken to calling it recently, Wor plus k. Wor is not a word unto itself, but rather another syllable in a fully functioning sentence made useful by phonemes, structure, and vital meaning comprising a full expressed thought as defined by language.
I believe that "Is it wort doin?" is the actual question.
That was Wizard.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When the alternative is paying $60 million to launch a GEO satellite that has more than half a second of lag because of how far away it is, a cheap balloon seems pretty financially viable to me.
No wood, water, or electricity, but hey they can do Facebook.
Satellites already exist for data connections and are quasi profitable. However there are technical issues with satellites for broad band internet service, and the biggest is the available spectral space is quite limiting for vast tracts of the developed world. Basically the issues with satellites are more than just cost
But that begs the question here really.. Is this new approach of using temporary balloon based distribution with the effort? I'm not so sure. Where I see the advantage of this idea, how's the operating cost of such a system going to be less than the existing cell network? What spectrum space are they planning to use? How will they obtain the rights to that space unless they buy it? Perhaps they plan to use 802.11 A/N spectrum under what ever passes as FCC part 15 in the UK?
If they are buying spectrum, they will go broke before they begin because the will be bidding with the Cell companies for the same space... If they are using unlicensed 802.11 a/n, then I wish them luck but I don't support their effort. 802.11 a/n is congested bad enough now, we don't need more emitters floating around making matters worse. Plus as a Amateur radio licensee, I have rights to a lot of that spectrum and thus have priority over part 15 users, and I actually do use some of that space and would not welcome their unlicensed intrusion.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The trouble is that 3/4 of the world is water and ice, with nobody below to use the balloons, making the whole idea very expensive. Also, a jet stream can move a balloon very rapidly away from a usage area at speeds of 200 km/h, with no way to get it back.
The alternative is not doing either, and investing your money in a totally different project.
802.11 doesn't work anyway, because the round trip times will be too large for the standard ACK timeout.
A trivial problem to solve when you can just increase the timeout values. I believe the recommendation is to add 2 s per 300 metres. These things don't need to support standard 802.11.
"The trouble is that 3/4 of the world is water and ice, with nobody below to use the balloons, making the whole idea very expensive"
There a thousands of islands and also >51000 merchant ships below and hundreds of thousands of leisure boats and naturally we can't forget the laser sharks, they want to 'phone home' as well.
Or they can learn how to plant trees, purify water, and generate electricity. Do you know how I know that you've never lived without clean water and electricity? Because you seem to think that you can live without these things and not have that be a bigger priority than Facebook.
I did at one point live in some jungle shack that had a pathetic wifi signal, sometimes dropping to tens of bytes per second. It did have electricity of some sort, and as for water, well, there was definitely a tap, but whether you considered the output water was a matter of opinion. When you have shitty Internet, you make the most of it -- I downloaded programming documentation. Facebook would be a non-starter, it's just too bandwidth-heavy even if it were in some sense useful.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Don't wor, be happ
Not the only alternative. You could launch lots of LEO satellites, I believe that is Musk's plan once SpaceX's reusable rocket tech is a bit more mature.
Yes, but while that solution may be cheaper per-user in the long run, it only does so through enormous economies of scale, as it will cost billions of dollars over hundreds of launches.