World Surveillance Group Inc (fka WSGI)

[kmanso]

March 21, 2005

TELECOM



Aerial Base Station
Trying again: stratospheric airships for communications
By Steven Ashley



Image: SANSWIRE NETWORKS STRATELLITE
POOR MAN’S SATELLITE: High-tech airship could fly for months above a city to provide Wi-Fi coverage.
The plan is familiar: park an antenna high in the stratosphere and then relay signals to and from devices below. Such an airborne transceiver could blanket urban areas with wireless coverage more cheaply than satellite-based alternatives while avoiding the need to build forests of mast-mounted base stations on the ground. In the past, various remote-controlled airplanes, balloons and blimps have been proposed to keep antennas aloft for months on end, but few have ever made it into the air, and none have operated commercially.
Previous failures, however, do not daunt the latest contender for the prize. This spring engineers at Sanswire Networks, an Atlanta-based Wi-Fi provider, plan to test a prototype of a high-tech airship that they claim could supply mobile communications service to major metropolitan areas for as long as 18 months at a stretch. "It's like a big pontoon boat in the sky," says company chairman Michael K. Molen. If the concept proves successful, fleets of whale-shaped "Stratellites"--short for stratospheric satellites--will fly 20 kilometers up to where the air is so thin that solar-powered electric motors can keep the $10-million-plus ships in geostationary "orbits."

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa004&articleID=0003D39D-9B5B-1213-987F83414B7F011C