World Surveillance Group Inc (fka WSGI)

[falon]

May have been posted.

http://www.apcmag.com/apc/v3.nsf/0/6C5D02F49AEC9267CA256F1E00120D7A

Thursday 30, September 2004

By APC Staff

Imagine what the Internet would be like without your clunky Net connection — no lag, no dropouts, no grainy streaming media. For a select few experimenting with futuristic broadband at speeds most of us can only dream about, this is already a reality.

This article is featured in APC September 2004 Back issues
SubscribeAt the Drysden Flight Centre in California’s Mojave Desert, the testing ground for unmanned predator drones and lunar landing vehicles, scientists are putting theories into practice. Beyond the clapped-out freighters and jumbos, you’ll find the wildest idea yet for high-speed Internet delivery. Designed as a “stratospheric” aircraft, the Proteus is capable of climbing to well over 50,000ft and has a cruise speed of mach 0.42. Oh yeah, and it also delivers your email.

Or at least it could, if the idea ever got off the ground. Proteus is just one of dozens of ideas — some outrageous, some close to fruition — designed to deliver broadband to homes and businesses so fast it will make ADSL and even cable modems seem snail-like by comparison. From tapping into the electricity grid to huge floating blimps and super-fast wireless and optic fibre, engineers are building networks capable of delivering everything from high definition video to virtual gaming worlds.

Sky high

The idea behind Proteus is truly pulled from the pages of Bold Entrepreneurial Experiments 101. First built in 1997/98 by jet designer Burt Rutan, who also helped design the cutting-edge SpaceshipOne prototype, Proteus was designed as a high altitude cross between a crop duster and a communications tower.

Flying at heights of up to 65,000ft, the plane could theoretically beam down data from its 18ft-wide antennae while flying a fixed pattern above major cities. Proteus is certainly capable of providing extremely fast connections: in demonstrations the Proteus team achieved a 52Mbit/s link for video conferencing, file transfers up to 7MB and Web browsing. They even tested a phone call while the “bird” flew overhead. By the calculations of the Proteus team, it would take only 16 seconds to transmit a 100,000 page document compared with seven hours using a 28.8Kbit/s modem, the standard technology at that time.

Marc Arnold, the CEO of backing company Angel, was keen to talk up the possibilities of the system, which the firm had dubbed HALO. “The HALO Network will provide high-speed broadband services over an area encompassing a typically large US metropolitan area, enabling individual consumers and businesses to send and receive data at multi-megabit per second rates,” Arnold enthused at the time. “HALO Network services will be replicated over metropolitan centres throughout the world.”

Sadly, geek dreams of squadrons of bandwidth-supplying jets circling overhead haven’t been realised. The idea has been stuck on the runway for years while Proteus has found other work collecting atmospheric samples for scientists, or testing collision avoidance systems.

But that’s not to say dreams of mega-speed Web downloads are over. Challenging Proteus for sheer audacity is the Stratellite, a giant airship that uses solar powered engines to sit at about 65,000ft, beaming data over a radius of about 77,700 square kilometres — think blimp meets mobile phone tower.

The Stratellite, which has been developed by a company called Sanswire, is 74.6m long, 44.2m high, and contains nearly 37 million litres of gas. Made of Kevlar, the dirigible is powered by electric motors and held in a position determined by six GPS units. In addition to Internet data, it can be fitted for mobile phone transmission, paging, fixed wireless telephony and high definition TV broadcasts. The downside is that the Stratellite can only sustain 18 months in the air without repairs.

It’s also cumbersome, but the blimp’s advantage over satellites is that it sits much lower to the ground, so it theoretically doesn’t suffer from the same data lag problems. The initial plan is to use one unmanned blimp to cover each metropolitan city.

“Our subscribers will be able to sit in their home on a laptop computer while connected to the Internet at high speed,” says Stratellite’s Web site (www.stratellite.net). “If they need to travel to another city, they simply take their laptop. . . and when they get to where they are going, they open their laptop again and they are still connected. No more finding local access numbers. No more tying up phone lines.”

Of course, getting government permission to launch giant communications balloons isn’t easy, though Sanswire reckons it is on track in the US to eventually cover the whole country and is reportedly discussing plans to bring the concept to Australia.

Light fantastic

While these wireless systems are attracting their share of sceptics, one high-speed technology is beginning to make its way off the drawing board. For decades, optic fibre was a plaything of scientists and corporations with budgets in the millions. Now it’s coming to homes.

Optic fibres are not new. Because of their reliability over long distances, the hair-thin glass tubes have been favoured by the telecom industry since the 1970s. Fibre also scales extremely well and can already deliver 40Gbit/s (science knows of no upper limit). To date, most applications of optical fibre have been in network backbones, undersea cables and other high traffic routes, largely because the equipment needed to run a fibre network has been expensive and complex to operate.

But while much demand for speedy home Internet is being met with ADSL, which has an impressive roadmap for greater bandwidth and is today’s dominant broadband medium, it’s really little better than a clever hack that squeezes extra performance from the copper wires that everyone in the telecommunications industry admits must eventually be replaced. Alternative delivery mechanisms such as cable TV networks also have promise, and wireless offers another way to boost the bandwidth available to your home. None, however, offer the bandwidth, longevity, reliability and flexibility of optic fibre.

The speeds are phenomenal. Fibre can theoretically deliver 100Mbit/s downloads, 400 times the average rate of DSL services. Best of all, there’s every chance that the connection will get faster over time.

One of the first companies to deliver optic fibre in Australia is Bright Telecommunications (www.brightonline.com.au). Bright’s service is currently available in Perth only, and while it can theoretically offer up to 100Mbit/s to each of the 200,000 homes in its coverage area, it restricts rates. A number of packages offering speeds between 100Kbit/s and 1Mbit/s and download limits from 1GB to 40GB, priced between $34.50 and $110 per month, are available. Customers can receive a bundle of Internet access, pay television and voice telephony over the two fibres.

Optic fibre allows users to drag down huge files as if they were kilobytes, not megabytes. “There’s a 34[MB file],” says Perth architect Mal Birch, trawling through his email client for some of the larger CAD files he sends home when he needs to catch up on work. “File size just isn’t a consideration any more.”

Before long, even 34MB may mean nothing to Birch, whose Internet connection already has enough bandwidth to permit him to experience fully rendered 3D representations of the buildings he designs in real time. His connection could also allow him to converse with avatars of his clients in the virtual world he creates, complete with realistic location-based sound and even physical feedback.

Australia currently has at least three fibre to the home (FTTH) projects underway. Telstra is working on an FTTH trial at Brookwater Estate, Greater Springfield, a new housing estate on the outskirts of Brisbane. The trial will include bundles of pay television, telephone and Net access, although Telstra will throttle back on fibre’s capacity in order to provide services that approximate today’s cable and ADSL offerings — no point in blowing all that capacity just yet.

Australia’s other notable fibre network is in Canberra, where TransACT Communications operates “fibre to the kerb”, an arrangement that sees the section between the home and fibre connection served with copper wire. The company’s service is capable of delivering 36Mbit/s downstream and 1.6Mbit/s upstream and includes pay television and a phone service, though once again speeds are restricted to a maximum of 1Mbit/s. There are three packages ranging in price from $59.95 to $83.45.

Similar bundles will doubtless emerge in the near future as more fibre, and other fast networks, are installed around Australia. And the networks will almost certainly get faster too as the technical difficulties that currently constrain speeds are solved.

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

So will anyone need this capacity? Alcatel’s director of innovation, Geoff Hayden, thinks high-speed networks aren’t so far-fetched.

“Fifteen to 20 years ago, the defence sector had large screen projection systems. Now we see them at affordable prices in the mass market,” he says, advancing a theory that military technologies take 15 to 20 years to become mainstream. “One of the things we see in defence now is ‘heads-up’ displays and holographic displays. I think it is entirely reasonable to say that we will have those in the year 2020, and they will need 100Mbit/s connections to deliver content to the home.

“Over the last 20 years we have migrated from power users having 300 baud modems to today’s broadband offerings,” he continues. “If you extrapolate that trend out to 2020 you get 1Gbit/s connections to the home.”

Of course, it’s hard to predict what those services will be. “Around 75% of all applications on FTTH networks will be based on video communication,” says communications analyst Paul Budde. “We are video-driven beings. Some 75% of video will be one-to-one private communications, the rest will be video- and audio-on-demand — services we can buy.”

That same bandwidth will also change the personal computing experience by making online access to applications a much better experience, Budde says. “Seventy to 80% of apps won’t be run by you any more and you won’t have to worry about viruses and so on.”

POWER LINES FOR POWER USERS?

Another broadband technology that has failed to set the world alight is sending broadband over power lines. Tested in various countries, the idea has met with mixed success, partly because ham radio enthusiasts caused an end to some trials which interfered with their radio sets. Well, it sounded like a good idea.

But with broadband becoming an obsession for techies alongside CPU speeds and high definition TV, it won’t be long before someone comes up with another idea to takeits place.