Breakthrough in Alphabet's Balloon-Based Internet Project Means It Might Actually Work (recode.net) 82
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.
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If you can hit an aircraft at an altitude of 65k feet, then it's probably classified as "one of the largest anti-aircraft cannons ever built" rather than a "bb gun".
Re:Where's my BB gun? (Score:4, Funny)
If you can hit an aircraft at an altitude of 65k feet, then it's probably classified as "one of the largest anti-aircraft cannons ever built" rather than a "bb gun".
Just attach your bb gun along with a remote firing mechanism to another balloon and release it. It's like sharks with laser beams attached to their heads, only with balloons and bb guns.
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Just attach your bb gun along with a remote firing mechanism to another balloon and release it. It's like sharks with laser beams attached to their heads, only with balloons and bb guns.
I smell a new Slashdot Meme!
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Balloons et Blunderbusses! [oddlyhistorical.com]
I thought this was only a thing from Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, [wikipedia.org] but it appears to have been historical.
will it Wor? (Score:1)
Wor is cool... would be even better if it worked though
Re:will it Wor? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: will it Wor? (Score:3, Funny)
Obsolutely nathing.
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Re:will it Wor? (Score:5, Funny)
Presumably it was typed on a Google balloon internet connection.
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Wor, what is it good for?
General Dynamics?
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Why? (Score:1)
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?
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because, Chad, lots of places don't have "local telecoms."
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Still, sticking a pole in the ground seems easier than keeping a balloon overhead.
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In Chad? Do you know how many people have to be paid off to keep the pole where you put it?
The problem is kleptocracies. Balloons are out of reach of the local governments.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Penetration of 24.3% in 2010, doesn't seem too bad.
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Chad's official urbanization rate is 22.5%...coincidence? http://www.indexmundi.com/chad... [indexmundi.com]
The question is: What % of revenue goes to paying for tower security and paying off the local kleptocrats?
Cell towers in the country would likely be dismantled and sold for scrap, unless guarded 24x7. Payoffs to the locals are required on top of the payoffs to the national government. It can quickly become a deal breaker when all the potential customers are poor.
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They better work on getting their shit together, then.
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I couldn't think of many. Even in the most backwater areas I found people running around with mobile phones.
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They are probably running around to look for, you know, reception
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Oh that's what they were doing when they were gyrating and flailing. I thought it's, you know, some sort of weird rain dance.
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Thank you. <3
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Clearly you've never dealt with Comcast.
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Google: "How much for us to run fiber on your network nationwide?"
Comcast: "TEN BILLION DOLLARS!!!"
Google: "Hmm... hey, do you know what centurylink's phone number is?"
Comcast: "I MEAN TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS!"
Google: "I've heard good things about verizon's network..."
Comcast: "WE WILL PAY YOU A MILLION DOLLARS!"
I know they are willing to take a big reduction in their outrageous profits just to maintain their near monopo
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Because the telecoms are the reason all this ridiculous shit is necessary to begin with.
If the telecoms weren't the grasping motherfuckers that they are, we would already have the high speed networks we already paid for through excise taxes for the last 20 years, and Google wouldn't have to spend the resources to try to work around them.
It might wor? (Score:2)
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Using my scrabble super powers, may I suggest the following verb infinitive forms that begin with WOR:
WORSHIP
WORSEN
WORRY
WORRIT [merriam-webster.com]
WORM.
That's pretty much it.
Wor (Score:2)
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Well played, sir. Well played.
Nice callback (Score:2)
That was Wizard.
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Machine Learning? (Score:2)
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.
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Indeed. I think internet is definitely one of the bear necessities of life.
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"Can it work?" is not the question... (Score:3)
"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.
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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.
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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, ho
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802.11 doesn't work anyway, because the round trip times will be too large for the standard ACK timeout.
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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.
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The alternative is not doing either, and investing your money in a totally different project.
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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.
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"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.
I loved Wor! (Score:3)
Wizard of Wor was one of my favorite arcade games back in the early 1980's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_Wor [wikipedia.org]
And they said I was ma (Score:2)
But it wor! I tell you it wor!
Improved connectivity (Score:2)
These new network balloons provide super reliable connec@FA#$F^xF1zNO CARRIER
Will it "Wor" like Google Fiber? (Score:1)
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...
They'll put ads on the sides (Score:1)
Wikipedia, not Facebook (Score:2)
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