SEBASS: It was in the Eonomist article 12-02-04...
"Like satellites, these airships will be able to provide wide-area mobile-telephone coverage, paging and other communications services. The company is most excited by the prospect of being able to provide wireless broadband coverage, akin to Wi-Fi, over large areas. A single airship could, says Mr Molen, potentially provide coverage over an area of nearly 800,000 square kilometres, or about the size of Texas. It should thus be possible to create “hotzones” of coverage encapsulating entire cities and their surrounding countryside, rather than the smaller “hotspots” of Wi-Fi coverage found in airports and coffee shops.
Standard Wi-Fi technology is, however, intended only for short-range communications. Beaming signals to and from an airship requires a special antenna. But the stratellite could be used to provide a high-speed connection to an access point for a home or office, which could then connect to nearby devices using Wi-Fi. The stratellite service would, in short, offer an alternative to cable and digital subscriber-line (DSL) broadband links. It would also be useful in countries with little or no network infrastructure, notes Ron Hochstetler, the chairman of the Airship Working Group at America's Federal Aviation Administration."
