Alphabet's Loon Balloons Just Beamed the Internet Across 620 Miles (zdnet.com) 61
Loon, the former Google X project and now independent Alphabet company, has developed an antenna system that could create a far greater ground coverage than previously possible. From a report: According to Loon each of its balloons, from 20km (12.4 miles) above earth, can cover an area of about 80km (49.7 miles) in diameter and serve about 1,000 users on the ground using an LTE connection. However, Loon balloons need a backhaul connection from an access point on the ground and without that connection the balloons can't provide connectivity to users on the ground. But on Tuesday the company revealed it had sent data across a network of seven balloons from a single ground connection spanning a distance of 1,000 kilometers, or about 621 miles. It also achieved its longest ever point-to-point link, sending data between two balloons over a distance of 600km (373 miles). The tests were carried out across California and Nevada, with the balloons punting data packets between each other from "desert to mountains and back again", according to Loon.
AC fail (Score:2)
No claim was made that the area itself is 80 km.
According to Loon each of its balloons, from 20km (12.4 miles) above earth, can cover an area of about 80km (49.7 miles) in diameter
That is more meaningful than saying "5026.5 km^2".
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12 meeelion acres...
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Your school did teach you about the squareness of pies and finding the area, no?
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My concern would be scaling
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Plans are already in place working toward that goal https://newatlas.com/airborne-... [newatlas.com]
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Such a network with such fast moving, constantly changing nodes is probably the worst case for building such a mesh, and as such is at least a couple years if not a decade or so away (I would love to be proven wrong). Projects like the balloons allow the engineers to isolate certain issues and work on others (In this case they seem to be focusing on the RF links between the balloons, the downlinks are most likely just re-purposed satellite earth stations) until eventually they can make the plane based netwo
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Nobody wants more aerial distance. That just increases latency. What matters is the useful transit distance from the ground station. The balloons are 12 miles high vs. about 22,000 miles high for geosynchronous satellites. Balloons decrease latency by several orders of magnitude.
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That would further reduce latency, but at the expense of having actual trees, mountains, etc. being in the way.
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1. it was a joke.
2. we're working on your suggestion anyway.
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Nobody wants more aerial distance. That just increases latency. What matters is the useful transit distance from the ground station. The balloons are 12 miles high vs. about 22,000 miles high for geosynchronous satellites. Balloons decrease latency by several orders of magnitude.
Well a bit more aerial distance wouldn't hurt. One ms at lightspeed = 186 miles so the plans Starlink has for 750 mile orbits is like 16 ms round trip instead of 500 to GEO and would be single-hop distances you'd need many balloons for that usually add about 4 ms/hop so in total I'm guessing as fast or faster. And being satellites they won't be affected by disasters on the ground. Of course at the moment it's just another over-optimistic Musk timeline but if we do get a LEO broadband network in place I thin
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More hops isn't all bad. The last-mile downlink can only handle so many subscribers, while the uplink hop-to-hop backbone is one large interleaved connection. I am pretty sure that part of the reason satellite is so slow is not just the roundtrip latency but also capacity. The other thing is that the balloon network can probably mesh to some extent since there are more and selectively route traffic to less-busy paths.
I'm not sure what ground disasters are affecting you 12 miles up. Tops of hurricanes
Google will abuse their station at every chance (Score:1)
They will use this to map unaffiliated networks and devices and track people outside of and alongside GPS, watch. It's a surveillance operation masked as a connectivity investment opportunity.
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That is indeed the initial target demographic from everything I've heard - heavily rural areas such as much of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, where many millions of people live at population densities too low to justify paved roads, much less short-range internet infrastructure.
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wealth densities. population is just a poor proxy. if the residents mattered enough, they'd have those amenities.
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Yes, because everyone is 100% convinced that crony capitalism accurately evaluates and rewards everyone's inherent worth.
And nobody would be interested in subsidizing an much cheaper way to deliver something as fundamentally empowering as internet access to places where most people have only heard of libraries in legend. Not out of egalitarianism, nor out of a desire to increase the taxable income of their population.
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well, yes. but it's cheaper to just let them rot.
oh, and "crony" is superfluous here. you can just call it "capitalism".
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HSMM-Mesh has been doing this for years (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sorry, this isn't some huge accomplishment.
Adhoc networking using HSMM-Mesh has been a reality on WRT54 hardware for YEARS. It can service multiple connection nodes, more than 1,000, including internet access if available to one or more nodes.
The flying of a GSM MSC/cell tower may be a bit less complex for the end user than having to have an HSMM-Mesh node to attach a network cable to but ham radio guys have been doing this on 2.4 GHz for years.
Also, flying a MSC/Cell Tower isn't all that unusual or novel either. We've been flying such things on fixed wing aircraft or in the back of trucks with crank up towers to provide emergency communications using cell phones for a long time too. Plus, flying HSMM-Mesh nodes on balloons has been done a lot too, to provide data network access to the balloon's GPS and cameras and run QSO's via data the data links.
Sorry Google, I'm not all that impressed..
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HSMM-Mesh works line of sight too. With 2W amps readily available, 600 Miles isn't some huge problem here. You may have to dial up the right parameters on the 802.11 link to account for the delay, but that's not hard with the HSSM-Mesh software.
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Interesting idea (Score:2)
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They've trained an AI to navigate the balloons by making them follow the weather patterns to stay in position.
It's actually quite impressive!
https://plus.google.com/+Proje... [google.com]
https://www.engadget.com/2016/... [engadget.com]
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
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Oops.. missing link
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech... [ieee.org]
The beacons of Gondor! (Score:2)
sent data across a network of seven balloons from a single ground connection spanning a distance of 1,000 kilometers, or about 621 miles.
LoTR [youtu.be] used this method first.
Doesn't sound very practical (Score:4, Interesting)
80 km diameter = 40 km radius
A = pi*r^2
A = pi * (40 km)^2
A = 5024 km^2
That works out to only one user per every 5 square km. This is the reason cell towers are typically spaced 3-7 km apart in urban and suburban areas. You need them that close to support the typical density of users in a cell. Their actual range if you don't have many users is much larger. GSM is limited to 35 km because it uses timeslices - beyond that a phone's transmission would arrive in the next phone's timeslice. CDMA will work as far out as the phone and tower are able to "hear" each other, which is more likely to be limited by line of sight than by distance (a 30 m tower only gets you about 25 km range before it's blocked by the horizon).
It might be useful in developing countries which don't have many cellular users, but from what I understand even third world countries are rapidly deploying standard cellular networks since it's so much cheaper than stringing up wires. That leaves the only practical use in emergencies if you block regular people from being able to use it, only allowing emergency personnel's devices to connect.
This could change in the future as MIMO [wikipedia.org] becomes more commonplace (it's included in the 5G standard. MIMO basically makes the signals and receivers directional, allowing multiple devices to use the same bandwidth without interfering with each other (too much).
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In places with more people, we already have cell towers. The balloons are for places where cell towers are not useful because there aren't enough people. Last week I drove from Nevada back to Seattle along a path that crossed some serious back country in NE California and eastern Oregon. There were multi-hour stretches with no cellphone signal whatsoever, let alone data connection, and little to no other traffic. Many places you don't even hear anything on the radio. It would be great to have a cell tower i