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Alphabet's Balloons Will Bring Cellphone Service To Puerto Rico (wired.com)
An anonymous reader writes:Hurricanes Irma and Maria wiped out more than 90 percent of the cellphone coverage on Puerto Rico. Now the FCC has given "Project Loon" permission to fly 30 balloons more than 12 miles above the island for the next six months, Wired reports, to temporarily replace the thousands of cellphone towers knocked down by the two hurricanes.
Each balloon can service an area of 1,930 miles, so the hope is to restore service to the entire island of Puerto Rico and parts of the U.S. Virgin Islands. In May Project Loon, part of Google's parent company Alphabet, deployed its technology in Peru and later provided emergency internet access there during serious flooding. (Those balloons were acually launched from Puerto Rico.) These new Project Loon balloons will be "relaying communications between Alphabet's own ground stations connected to the surviving wireless networks, and users' handsets," according to the article, which reports that eight wireless carriers in Puerto Rico have already consented to the arrangement.
Each balloon can service an area of 1,930 miles, so the hope is to restore service to the entire island of Puerto Rico and parts of the U.S. Virgin Islands. In May Project Loon, part of Google's parent company Alphabet, deployed its technology in Peru and later provided emergency internet access there during serious flooding. (Those balloons were acually launched from Puerto Rico.) These new Project Loon balloons will be "relaying communications between Alphabet's own ground stations connected to the surviving wireless networks, and users' handsets," according to the article, which reports that eight wireless carriers in Puerto Rico have already consented to the arrangement.
Great idea, and not just a marketing puff like we get from Elon.
or is this just for good public relations/"corporate social responsibility" ?
sorry if my skepticism about all thing alphabet, and other big techs, offends anyone; i just can't be blind to their past track record.
btw, given we have been hyped about these balloons for years, why is there no real wide deployments(announced several times in multiple countries) up to now?
holy fuck. that little island has more competition for cellular service than the mainland.
...Each balloon can service an area of 1,930 miles...
How about
Each balloon can service an area of 1,930 square miles...
Bold and additions mine...
What else do you do when you don't settle for being merely evil?
What say now brown cow? Reminds me of the laser.
I don't read AC
Just wonder what happens to the ability to communicate when really rough weather comes in?
;)
Everything works really great in a calm pristine environment. But maybe infrastructure is like coding, it is the exceptions that get you
I recall reading this article a few years ago while staying at my sister's place in Merced and wondering if this could be done for PR . . . . I guess it can. Cool. http://www.mercedsunstar.com/n...
Because of inertia and reluctance to leave older, established technologies, it's not often that you get a chance to try out a widescale deployment of a theoretical new technology in a developed nation. Implementing it in some place like Africa wouldn't stress it as much as a developed nation would, so the results and conclusions aren't always applicable to a different market. This is actually a great opportunity for them to do a real-world test of whether this balloon cellular idea works as well as it does on paper in a first world nation.
Google is probably as anxious to get some real-world data from a widescale implementation, as Puerto Rico is to restore cellular service. And then they can know if this is something worth pursuing in the future, or if there's some unforeseen fly in the ointment which will lead them to shelve the project.
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Where should I send the invoice?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
instead of allowing their own employees vacation time. I've worked for Google for a couple of years and no one was allowed to take any time off other than a long weekend. That money would be much better spent to allow us time off.
What does it matter WHY?
What good is a cell phone? How about calling 911? Or doing business? Coordinating reconstruction? Medical advice? Telephones are pretty critical infrastructure - it's hard to think of anything more so. And they're easy to charge even without mains power - you can charge from car and truck batteries, solar cells, generators - all are sufficient to charge lots of phones, because they don't need much power.
"Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff."
Are the folks who live there taking care of themselves or not?
How many towers were down and how many has the phone company gotten back up so far?
How does their repair rate compare to Texas after the last hurricane??
A known spying organization is deploying balloons to help the Puerto Ricans communicate in their time of need. This need is genuine and I'm sure everyone is grateful for the assistance. Therefore this sounds very nice and a good thing to do for any organization. But in light of what Google does with its services (email accounts, blog hosting, phone call proxy/rerouting, etc.) and the article's lack of describing any restrictions on this generous service, I wonder what else will the organization do with the data they get access to via this service? Are there conditions put on Alphabet to make sure this doesn't double as taking advantage of the needy?
Digital Citizen
Thas fanastic.
In a typical emergency, power will not be restored for atleast a week. During that time phone batteries will die out. We need technology to keep phone alive during that golden (rather critical) period to save lives, contact people, help supply management by/for victims of diaster on large scale. What good is the innovation in latest pixel or powerbank.
While not a bad idea, fact is this project failed miserably when it was tested in Brazil.
So Google is just looking for a workaround regulations to try it again.
The plan as described appears to assume the balloons will stay in nearly same lat and long once launched or at least with in line of sight of PR. To find out of this is true or not for Puerto Rico, have a look at earth.net.org specifically over PR at 70 mbar pressure which corresponds roughly to the proposed height of these balloons. https://earth.nullschool.net/#... In fact the wind speed at that height is about 20 km/hr. So in 24 hours the balloons will travel about 500 km which is beyond line of site from where they were the day before. Also PR is about 50 x 150 km. The only way to impose some choice about where the balloon goes is by changing the amount of gas in the envelope to cause the balloon to rise or fall to altitudes where the wind velocity is different. Using earth.nullschool.net to see the winds velocities over PR for different heights, this approach doesn't look promising.
Each balloon will, one presumes, be anchored and communicated with by a long cable, right?
What's to keep all those military and news helicopters and aircraft from running into the cables? They can be quite hard to see, don't you know?
Big orange balls anchored every 50 feet vertically? Good luck with that.