Global Telcos Join Alphabet, SoftBank's Flying Cellphone Antenna Lobbying Effort

Alphabet and SoftBank's attempts to launch flying cellphone antennas high into the atmosphere have received backing from global telcos, energizing lobbying efforts aimed at driving regulatory approval for the emerging technology. From a report: Loon, which was spun out of Google parent Alphabet's business incubator, and HAPSMobile, a unit of SoftBank Group's domestic telco, plan to deliver high speed internet to remote areas by flying network equipment at high altitudes. Lobbying efforts by the two firms, which formed an alliance last year, are being joined by companies including aerospace firm Airbus, network vendors Nokia and Ericsson and telcos China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica and Bharti Airtel.

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[A10Mechanic]

Yes, and that is the difference between a cell phone and a satellite phone. I'd prefer my cell phone to not look like something I'd use to call in an airstrike.

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[rtb61]

I prefer a fibre optic cable, it is far more stable, reliable and secure. In reality the cheapest of all public services to run, cheaper than water, cheaper than sewer, cheaper than electricity, cheaper than storm water, way, way cheaper than roads even dirt roads and even still cheaper than fucking footpaths. The very cheapest public service is fibreoptic cable. Why the resistance, sheer unmitigated psychopathic greed and a fuck humanity attitude, I WANT MORE MORE MORE, no matter how much those fucking cun

Doesn't work as well with satellites

[Solandri]

The reason cellular phone service is broken up into cells (area serviced by one tower) is only partly due to range. The other reason is to limit the number of phones within listening range of the tower. If your tower is close to the ground, then the few thousand phones within a few km radius of it will have a much stronger signal strength than phones further away. This automatically filters out all but a few thousand phones (those closest to the tower).

If your "tower" is a satellite orbiting hundreds of miles above the earth, then millions if not tens of millions of phones underneath it will have the same signal strength, and will all interfere with each other. That's why most two-way satellite communication is done with large dishes focusing the signal into a tight pencil beam (boosting its strength relative to background noise), and why Iridium satellite phones will only work so long as the service remains expensive with a limited number of users.

The balloon idea suffers the same problem as a satellite, but to a lesser degree. It wouldn't have worked two decades ago. But newer technologies are based on orthogonal codes (all phones can transmit at the same time, signal processing figures out what each individual phone transmitted). And on multipath [wikipedia.org] to help distinguish phones from each other based on their direction (basically a rudimentary form of a phased array radio [wikipedia.org]). These technologies may allow a balloon to cope with the hundreds of thousands of phones which end up inside its coverage range, but would be insufficient to simultaneously deal with millions of phones a satellite would see.

They should provision areas with only 1 provider

[bobstreo]

Rural development (in the USA) has been bartered off to existing ISP providers, which haven't done much in 30 years besides taking the money.

Perhaps the FCC and their beloved corporate step dog Idjit Pai(d) should throw some money at Starlink or Loon to stimulate technology.