. . . good point DuffBeer; however, if you had read the article, you might have noticed that this is towed array sonar, based on ships. The issue here is not stealth, it is detection.
Telecoms and startups have had things like this well into the design stage for at least a year or so. I remember seeing bird-house like megabit laser arrays in Wired as far back as 1999. The idea was always that a grid of such arrays could provide a broadband net across a major city and provide fat data pipes for corporate customers without having to tear through the infrastructure at tremendous expense. I think these devices are made by AirFiber or TeraBeam and are now being taken to market. If I recall they got around the bird 'problem' by using redundant transmitter/detectors in a single array. Either the tech discussed in this post is some new twist that I'm not fully appreciating or just old tech masquerading as a breakthrough.
Slashdot Mirror
. . . good point DuffBeer; however, if you had read the article, you might have noticed that this is towed array sonar, based on ships. The issue here is not stealth, it is detection.
Use spacenet
Telecoms and startups have had things like this well into the design stage for at least a year or so. I remember seeing bird-house like megabit laser arrays in Wired as far back as 1999. The idea was always that a grid of such arrays could provide a broadband net across a major city and provide fat data pipes for corporate customers without having to tear through the infrastructure at tremendous expense. I think these devices are made by AirFiber or TeraBeam and are now being taken to market. If I recall they got around the bird 'problem' by using redundant transmitter/detectors in a single array. Either the tech discussed in this post is some new twist that I'm not fully appreciating or just old tech masquerading as a breakthrough.