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The Internet Communications Networking

Internet Broadband Through High-altitude Drones 99

Posted by Soulskill from the internet-of-wings dept.
mwagner writes: Skynet is coming. But not like in the movie: The future of communications is high-altitude solar-powered drones, flying 13 miles above the ground, running microwave wireless equipment, delivering broadband to the whole planet. The articles predicts this technology will replace satellites, fiber, and copper, and fundamentally change the broadband industry. The author predicts a timescale of roughly 20 years — the same amount of time between Arthur C. Clarke predicting geosynchronous satellites and their reality as a commercial business. "Several important technology milestones need to be reached along the way. The drones that will make up Skynet have a lot more in common with satellites than the flippy-flappy helicopter drone thingies that the popular press is fixated on right now. They're really effing BIG, for one thing. And, like satellites, they go up, and stay up, pretty much indefinitely. For that to happen, we need two things: lighter, higher-capacity wireless gear; and reliable, hyper-efficient solar tech."
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Internet Broadband Through High-altitude Drones More

Internet Broadband Through High-altitude Drones

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  • I'm betting on balloons (Score:5, Insightful)

    by justthinkit ( 954982 ) <floyd@just-think-it.com> on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @12:22AM (#48201377) Homepage Journal
    Balloons make more sense, don't they?

    • Re:I'm betting on balloons (Score:5, Interesting)

      by quenda ( 644621 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @12:44AM (#48201459)

      For 98% of the population, towers as used currently make even more sense.
      Ground-based cellular systems can pack close together in cities, and spread out in the suburbs and rural areas.
      These drones are stuck at high altitude, so except for remote areas they are wasting bandwidth and battery life on the ground.
      Drones might be useful for extra large LTE cells in northern Canada or central Australia. Perhaps replace Iridium.

      Must be a slow news for nerds day.

      • Perhaps replace Iridium.

        Now that's a good point. Perhaps there are many jobs currently done by satellites that can be done more cheaply by drones. Weather monitors, etc.

        • Re:I'm betting on balloons (Score:5, Informative)

          by dargaud ( 518470 ) <slashdot2@@@gdargaud...net> on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @03:57AM (#48201897) Homepage
          I mountain areas coverage is very spotty, even in densely populated mountains like the Alps: in deep twisted valleys you have to install too many antennas, and north faces (in the northern hemisphere) impede the use of geosync satellites by blocking line-of-sight. And there's never an irridium above you when you are in a valley. When I was in Himalaya we had a chart of time windows when satellites were above us and we could make quick calls or SMS. Balloons/drones can improve on that.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by darkain ( 749283 )

        Except what is the line of sight efficiency with zero obstructions when something is directly above you, vs traveling through buildings, trees, etc at ground level. Yeah, when indoors it would probably be about the same, but in outdoor conditions (where we're away from wifi and actually need better signal), this will be great. Oh, and also, this can simply be supplemental to existing tech, such as phones being able to pull data off both cell and wifi. Now they'll have a third option. As someone who frequent

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by quenda ( 644621 )

          OK, I can see that in mountainous areas one drone can replace many towers to give line of sight.
          But the drone still needs to be near overhead, so will not cover a massive area like an Irridium satellite.

          And a bunch of mass-produced solar-powered, LOS microwave-link meshed hilltop cells will likely still be easier than one mega-drone.
          And safer.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by icebike ( 68054 )

      The whole story is a balloon, a trial balloon.
      Let's promise broadband everywhere and see if the sheep will buy into (pay for) our surveillance platform.

      • yeah but the surveillance blimps / black helicopters are already up there. NSA is not worried about opening up a parallel revenue stream.

    • I'd rather see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]

    • There was an article a few years back on /. about a network of weather balloons with hotspots, forget the name of the system. It is a bit labor intensive, since each unit only stays in flight 3-5 days, and the shoebox needs to be recovered and returned.

      Zeppelin ROVs have also been discussed on /. before, and offer substantial improvements over the system, but not really lower costs-- just trade offs.

      Traditionally, wireless always makes sense when you have limited subscriber density or portability requireme

    • There was an idea like this floated in the 1990s, called Strato station or something. Balloons at 80km altitude (in the stratosphere) providing coverage. I seem to remember that Loral and Alenia Spaziale were both involved to some extent. It was abandoned because it is too difficult to keep balloons static (even at that altitude) and this would need expensive tracking antennae on the ground (in the 1990s digital beamforming was simply not available for commercial use). Anybody else remember this? It was aro

    • Balloons cost a million to launch, and stay up a couple weeks. I could see drones having a real advantage. Then again, geostationary satellites have an even bigger advantage.

  • If only (Score:5, Informative)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @12:35AM (#48201427) Journal
    Not much particularly interesting in the article, the primary thing missing is a financial analysis showing drones are cheaper than towers or really better in any way; but the article is a treasure trove of beautifully (stupid?) quotes.

    "some work still needs to be done on the physics....[but] certainly not anything beyond the reach of hard-working American (or Chinese, or Chinese-American) engineering types."

    "solar tech (which, let’s be honest, has all been a bit shit until now) "

    "As usual, the "media" have completely and utterly missed this story"

    an extra allocation of "stupid points" go to the editors of Wired Magazine .....Wiretards

    Wired Magazine gets to continue being the authority on the Internet of Things That Don’t Matter

    • Towers fail in time to deploy. Even small scale towers- utility poles or street lights) in mesh networks take substantial time to get licensing and rights-of-way in place. Wireline services have similar constraints, but just for the initial pathway installation, which can be leveraged for decades. A wireless technology upgrade needs to happen every 2-5 years if the service is successful.

    • I could be wrong, but I don't think any propeller driven aircraft has flown to 65,000 feet, or even anywhere close. There is a problem with the low density air that makes props a really poor choice for high altitude. Since a solar jet has huge tech problems as well, I think the concept is stuck with problems that it can't easily solve.

  • Yes, balloons pop, but mechanical systems fail or jam (due to foreign matter).

  • So what happens at night?

    • Re:Solar powered drones (Score:4, Funny)

      by pushing-robot ( 1037830 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @01:05AM (#48201529)

      The zombie drones attack.

      • We joke, but it's clearly a target for Denial of Service attacks.

        Or anyone who can train a large group of Artic Terns to fly in a circle. Should be pretty easy if you just clip the left wing.

    • presumably these drones make so much electricity during the day from solar panels that they store the surplus into batteries, and run off the batteries at night.

      Only problem I see is that both solar panels and lithium batteries weight too much and don't generate/store enough juice. So all this is just pipe dreaming until some super breakthroughs happen. Which might be never.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by necro81 ( 917438 )
      A variety of people have been working on solar airplanes that collect sufficient energy during the daylight hours that, through a combination of electrical storage (batteries, reversible fuel cells, etc.) and mechanical storage (going to higher altitude during the day, then losing some at night) you can provide continuous operation. This isn't a new idea [wikipedia.org], and practical realizations of it are tantalizingly [solarimpulse.com] close [space-airbusds.com].

  • Wired Access Will Still Be Standard (Score:5, Informative)

    by logicnazi ( 169418 ) <gerdesNO@SPAMinvariant.org> on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @01:44AM (#48201625) Homepage

    Sorry, but wires will always have substantially greater bandwidth. If for no other reason than you can run one (or even several) wires into each structure and get at least as much bandwidth as is shared over a wide area by the plane.

    Since bandwidth use will no doubt continue to increase by the time we have these giant broadband stationary planes everyone will want too much bandwidth to make them a reasonable competitor for fiber (and multiplexing will move down market into the home eventually).

    • And fiber has even more bandwidth than copper.

      Your point is correct about fixed links providing far more bandwidth that what can be provided by any kind of wireless link. The drone concept only make sense in places like the lightly populated areas of the US or similar countries where customers are too far apart to make wireline or fiber communications affordable. The low altitude with respect to satellites means that the link frequencies can be re-used more frequently.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Assuming the need is infinite, if your demands are satisfied you might turn to flexibility and convenience. Last quarter we here in Norway saw a tiny dip in fixed residential broadband for the first time ever, whether that's a fluke or not is uncertain but business lines have been on the decline for some time because small 1-5 man shops use 3G/LTE to check their mail rather than having a dedicated broadband line in the office. It's just an extension of that most "normal" people I run into use wireless now i

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pubwvj ( 1045960 )

      Wired is great for densely populated areas but much of the world is sparsely populated. Out here in the sticks we don't need the high bandwidth and we don't have the numbers of people to justify the expense. Drones or balloon could be a far lower cost option that would provide that coverage and would complement wired. The overlap is good.

  • it only takes an idiot with a 'torrent running to suck up the bandwidth. A real smart idea this is not.

  • Obviously the problem with baloons is they blow away. But we could mitigate the weight so that these drones almost float on their own and use less energy to stay up. We might even use devices that work like submarines and pump the hellium or hydrogen back into pressurized compartments so that the temperature differences can be compensated for between night and day or even design the drones to glide back towards a location before inflating the baloon portion of the device.

  • Force the CableTV companies and telcos to run Fiber and then fix the last mile mess.

    Dammit, these companies are making record profits. They can get off their asses and run fiber and fix the last mile Bullshit.

  • This is literally SkyNet

  • Why does everyone want to think drones will do everything in the future? Do we actually need this? They really seem like the 21st century equivalent of the flying car. Or perhaps a better example is video phones in 80s sci-fi movies. People just seem to really like the idea, even if time may tell that it will not be nearly as important as is being proposed if it ends up happening at all. So now there is Facetime and Skype and a few things like that, but 99% of all calls occur still in the same old-fashioned
    • There's a ton of useful applications for stuff like this. You wouldn't use it for access in heavily populated areas but there's plenty of usefulness in disaster areas, remote areas and military application. Not every technological development is about getting Netflix to your home faster. A drone that can fly above a hurricane could be available immediately after any natural disaster except for a solar flare. That could make relief efforts a lot easier, by allowing organizations to coordinate without nee

  • Skynet

    Could we maybe pick a different name?

  • I think he is on to something but the path lengths are too long. Presuming the market will stand for nothing less than mobility and at least 4G class data rates, physics requires that radio paths be shorter than he conjectures. Here's why: Mobility means the user device must be powered from batteries and fit in your pocket. It must contain its own antenna. Thus there is a maximum local_storage/delivered_bit ratio available. It costs battery power to deliver a bit of information. Non-line-of-sight paths

    • what if ur in a city and the to of the buildings are already several hundred meters high? then if a thing is tethered to the ground it might bump into buildings.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by n6gn ( 851311 )

        what if ur in a city and the to of the buildings are already several hundred meters high? then if a thing is tethered to the ground it might bump into buildings.

        Start at the building tops - cell sites already do. The issue is to get very close to LOS to the user base so that that data vs. energy is maximized. Take a look at COST231/Hata or similar real-world RF pathloss models. Anything other than LOS is a killer and can't be afforded. The present flooding model for cellular architecture is inherently broken. Montana|Idaho|etc never will get full coverage highspeed data, the present approach doesn't scale. Going too far/high doesn't work either. Satellite distrib

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