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Communications Wireless Networking Hardware

Balloon Based Wireless Floated 54

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the ceo-full-of-hot-air dept.
AmigaAvenger writes "It was recently announced by Yahoo news that the Arizona based company Extend America will be testing high altitude balloon service over North Dakota to handle the duties of cell phone towers. Three balloons will be able to take the place of 1,100 cell phone towers, and will remain aloft for 24 hours. Plans call for the service to be sold wholesale to existing wireless carriers, and will include both voice and data service."
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Balloon Based Wireless Floated More

Balloon Based Wireless Floated

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  • And... what? How much will this cost? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Pichu0102 ( 916292 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @02:57PM (#14600759) Homepage Journal
    First thing, why would they spend so much money on such hardware to power this when the equipment could be damaged in the air, and second, how long daily would people have to deal with downtime if these balloons are their only way to connect?
    • There wasn't a price on the equipment itself, but they seem to expect that it will "fall in a lake or get run over by a truck" so it can't be too expensive. However, they mention paying a bounty in order to get people to return the equipment, that could get rather expensive after a while.
    • a lot of the costs associated with owning the land would be washed by this i would think, but what about equipment recovery. do they just say so-long? guess i better read the article.
    • Well, three balloons is like 1,100 towers... 1,100 towers is ALOT of $$$ upfront and to maintain.

      So, I would assume even if this service was 20 times more expensive than a single tower, you'd still want it more than human wants air and food.

      • Well the numbers don't work out exactly that way. The figure comes from the fact that in south-dakota it would take 1,100 tower to cover the state, instead they are using 3 ballons. The state is very rural. You can be sure that 3 ballons would not be nearly enough if placed over an urban area, simply because while you would have the coverage area of NY with maybe 5 ballons, you simple couldn't handle the millions of calls with so few ballons.

        Either way in call volume one of these ballons may not even handle
    • $55 for the balloon- and just thinking about it, I'd expect about $3000 (the price of 6-8 cell phones) per balloon. They're only relays to ground stations after all, not full blown towers in and of themselves (or else they'd have to be tethered).
  • So they'll have to redeploy every 24 hours?
    • Yep. One set comes down, another one is aloft, and another is in the process of being launched.

    • Re:The summary seems... off. (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      So they'll have to redeploy every 24 hours?
      Yes, this would be a continuous process of launching balloons and retrieving the electronics after the balloons drift away or burst. But reading the article would have answered that for you.
      • The article mentions the deployment cycle, but the 24 period is an invention of the submitter, apparently, so your quick answer also seems... off.
      • Yes, this would be a continuous process of launching balloons and retrieving the electronics after the balloons drift away or burst. But reading the article would have answered that for you.

        Seems to me that would require nine balloons at any given time, not three.
        • Well, it would depend on the amount of time it takes to get a balloon to altitude, and the turnaround time before you can relaunch; I'd guess that if you need three balloons for coverage you can probably get away with just four in most situations, which leaves room for one of them to be landing or launching at any given time - although to provide redundancy in case one balloon fails, you should really have five.
    • I would expect every time there's heavy rain, a bad wind storm, or a tornado, the system will likely go down. Literally. Or some yahoo with a rifle and too much time on his hands.

  • The balloons swell from six feet in diameter to 30 feet after they gain altitude. Once a balloon leaves the state, its toaster-size communications pod would jettison, deploy a parachute and fall to earth, where it would signal its position.

    I can just see these balloons falling in some interesting places like some guy driving 80mph down a highway and hitting one of them.

    "We'd pay some guy a bounty, put in a new battery pack and send it off again," Knoblach said. Schafer said the repeater could be used i

    • Re:Landing Zones (Score:3, Interesting)

      by macklin01 ( 760841 )

      I can just see these balloons falling in some interesting places like some guy driving 80mph down a highway and hitting one of them.

      That's a good point. Fortunately, the odds are low, especially given (by TFA) that it's being targeted at very sparsely-populated markets (e.g., North Dakota). Nonetheless, they'll certainly need to weigh the low odds with the high cost of such an event. (Huge legal liability, particularly if the driver is injured or killed, or if it leads to a larger accident.)

      Ona rela

    • Re:Landing Zones (Score:3, Informative)

      by vertinox ( 846076 )
      I can just see these balloons falling in some interesting places like some guy driving 80mph down a highway and hitting one of them.

      Have you been to North Dakota?

      If someone falls out of the sky in either of those states, you've got a 99.9999% of hitting empty space.

      The other 0.0001% will involve you hitting a cow or maybe a pheasant bird ;)

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dakota [wikipedia.org]

      Population
      - Total (2000)
      - Density Ranked 47th
      642 200
      3.59/km (47th)

      Yeah, I spent more time visiting South Dako
  • So what happens during a windy, rainy storm when cell phone use is highly important for emergencies.
    • Iowa gets free WiFi.
    • From TFA, the balloons will float above any storms.

      noblach is certain the balloons will work for cellular service in North Dakota -- even in cold or stormy weather. He said balloons were launched even during Hurricane Katrina.

      Up to 20 miles above the earth, well above commercial airliner pathways, steady stratospheric winds would push the latex balloons across the state at about 30 mph.
  • FTA:

    Once a balloon leaves the state, its toaster-size communications pod would jettison, deploy a parachute and fall to earth, where it would signal its position.

    "We'd pay some guy a bounty, put in a new battery pack and send it off again," Knoblach said. Schafer said the repeater could be used indefinitely "unless it lands in a lake or gets run over by a truck."

    So what happens if it HITS a truck? Or a small child?

    • Watch for *rising* cell phone repeaters.

      Who's to say the balloon wouldn't get sucked into a jet engine on its way upward?

      Perhaps this company has a lot of liability insurance since it's a smaller object we're dealing with.

      But, more likely, the idea of this causing bodily harm directly or indirectly has been ignored and any discussion squelched.
      • I doubt it's been ignored. My guess is they'll be dealing with some type of air traffic control for each balloon's ascent. It makes me shudder to think, however, that they would need "a lot of liability insurance" because of the thousands of humans cruising the skies every day. I would hope their design was a bit more proactive.

  • After all the Hindenburg and her brother zeppelins were meant to ferry not only passengers but mail. Call this the next generation of airship communications, although using balloons. I had even thought of this a few years back; mount cell transponder equipment on blimps and have them hover over populated areas to act as relays for mobile phones and wireless Internet.

    But if you're going to go to the degree of high altitude balloons, why stop there? Satellites would be the ultimate answer. Ask Arthur C. Cla [lsi.usp.br]

    • I think the reason why going with balloons is better at the moment is a balloon is a _lot_ cheaper than a satellite. Also, a balloon can cover one static area of ground, where a satellite has to be in geosynchronous orbit to achieve that, and that is a _long_ way away (22,240 miles). Lag time at that distance is definitely noticeable (about 1/4th of a second). Your other option to provide constant coverage of one area is to have a whole mess of satellites such that there is always at least one visible in th

      • I think the problem with reaching geostationary orbit with a cell phone is good old 1/r^2, which is the rate at which power transmitted falls off with distance r from the antenna, roughly speaking. How far can your tiny 1 or 2 watt radio transmitter send its signal and be picked up by a reasonable-sized antenna? Not far. 22,000 miles is asking for a very sensitive (i.e. big) antenna in orbit, or boosting the size of the transmitter on Earth, or both.
    • The downside to satellite phones is the distance the signal travels to reach the satellite and bounce back to the destination, is great enough to cause a noticible delay. Geo-stationary [ery? I don't remember which witch is which] satellites I think can introduce a 2000ms ping time in Internet based systems for instance.

      Balloons would add fantastic redundancy, but I dont think would make a great primary server. They could however be great for people stuck where a tower can't give service thanks to hills.
  • Sounds very good. Just 3 balloons taking the place of 1100 wireless towers sounds great. I would think they could provide wireless broadband. One question, if they're floating in the Stratosphere, wont there be a chance of mid-air collision with jets?

  • This is great... One of these balloons gets popped by a rare super-high-altitude pheasant and crashes to earth, and crashlands in Squeallikeapigboy, Mississipi.

    Long story short: balloon gets mistaken for UFO, pheasant gets mistaken for intelligent alien life.

    (I bet those Roswell aliens are rolling in their graves right now)

  • "Three balloons will be able to take the place of 1,100 cell phone towers, and will remain aloft for 24 hours. "

    My guess is this is a test run. If the baloons aren't able to stay up for more than a day it would be a headahce to constantly deploy them. It would be nice to remove 1100 towers that easy. I've heard that a tower can cont in excess of $1M.

    Even if the baloons were pricy, it would take a lot of failures to cost as much as the towers do. If you could keep them up for a week to a month and only neede
  • I mean, balloons to float expensive electronics.

    First, aircraft, think of the aircraft.

    Second, how much maintenance will this require. I don't think mankind has invented a system where gas can remain in an enclosed cavity for an extended period of time without expelling in some way ( or exploding ). If this balloon has to be pulled down every week or month to top it up with gas, will people generally like having their service interrupted frequently? This is opposed to a a fixed metal tower that doesn't n
    • Has anyone actually RTFA? Every point you brought up except the first one is address in the article. The balloons will be up for 24 hours a piece. They will not be tethered and will float until they leave the state. At that point, they'll float back to earth, be retrieved, maintained, and put bakc into the cycle. The whole package costs a mere $55. I don't think they're too worried about severe weather.
    • First: 20 miles up is approximately 105,000 feet. As of yet, the only plane that can reach that altitude is the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, and those things aren't exactly common.

      Second: The balloons are not intended to be pulled down and "topped off", they're supposed to be free-floating and come down at a set time. Also, it's pretty damn cheap to fill a balloon with hydrogen (yes, hydrogen, RTFA) and send it cruising. And if you look at it, 1,100 towers, conservatively priced at $250K each gives you abou
  • We've got rolling hills and valleys that prevent short-to-medium towers (less than 250 ft.) from making a decent connection, lots of trees to help block signals, and not enough people to justify building tall towers. A lot of the landlines have 1970's equipment (24 Kbps is what I'm getting right now, sometimes it's worse), and no carrier wants to bring in cable or dsl (they say that we won't live long enough to see THEM bring it out here.)

    I'm only able to access streaming media/audio if I travel 20 miles in

  • Stratellites Better, I Think (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DigitalRaptor ( 815681 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @04:42PM (#14601909)
    I think that Stratellites [sanswire.com] would be better, when they are finally deployed.

    One Stratellite will cover 100,000 square miles.

    They remain aloft for months at a time, when it finally does need service another is sent up beside it, they electronically transfer control to the new one, and the other descends for servicing.

    They are above the winds, airplanes, etc, and aren't dropping things every 24 hours like the balloons in the article.

    I hope they hurry up, I'm ready to subscribe so I can use the same internet connection at home, on the road, and at my cabin.

    • They [Stratellites] are above the winds, airplanes, etc, and aren't dropping things every 24 hours like the balloons in the article.
      Nothing is above the wind. (From their FAQ, I don't give 'em much of a chance. Not one single answer is scientifically accurate.)
  • there is another reason for people to say i sound high on the phone *grin*

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