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AnchorDesk

David Coursey
Why wireless future is literally up in the air

David Coursey
Executive Editor, AnchorDesk
Wednesday, May 28, 2003
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Can a balloon compete with DSL and cable to provide inexpensive broadband access, especially in areas that might be too expensive to wire? Can it replace two-way satellites for high-speed connections in rural areas? Could a stationary blimp, 14 miles up in the sky, provide two-way wireless communications for a big city?

Proponents of "aerostats" say the answer is yes, that these helium-filled blimps can not only do all of these things, but might also inexpensively challenge wired broadband providers in urban areas.

WHAT GOT ME thinking about this was a Monday story from BBC News describing a company called SkyLinc. The company claims that 18 aerostats, each about 5,000 feet up in the air, could provide broadband coverage for the entire United Kingdom.

A U.S. company, Sky Station, headed by former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, has an even more ambitious plan: a free-floating aerostat stationed 70,000 feet above the world's major cities, handling a wide variety of wireless communications needs.

The whole idea might sound loopy, but it actually makes sense and is something we--well, the military and government--have been using for the past 50 years or so.

Right now, 15 tethered aerostats are floating above the U.S./Mexican border, providing radar imaging and communications support. The National Weather Service uses aerostats as a radar platform, and the Voice of America's TV Marti uses one to hoist a UHF TV transmitter high enough to beam a signal into Cuba from the Florida Keys.

I WAS TALKING about this with Alex Slawsby, who follows wireless technology for IDC but hadn't paid much attention to aerostats before I sent him the BBC story. He immediately went over to Slashdot, where the topic had already been raised and a debate was already raging about how big a rifle you'd need to shoot an aerostat down. Those alpha geeks can be so charming sometimes.

One of the leaders in the field is Lockheed Martin; its aerostat operations are headquartered in Akron, Ohio (home, coincidentally, of the Goodyear blimps).

To get the answer to the aerostat assassin question and others, I called an engineer at Lockheed Martin, whose name I won't reveal to protect him from his corporate PR department. "Can you shoot an aerostat down with a rifle?" I asked.

"No," he told me. "The difference in pressure between the inside of the aerostat and the atmosphere is so low that it would take hours to notice any sort of leak."

WHAT ABOUT bad weather? The engineer told me that, depending on the value of the aerostat versus the importance of the mission, you might want to drag the thing down in advance of a severe thunderstorm. That takes about 20 to 30 minutes, he told me. Then you can quickly refly the aerostat when weather improves.

That process would, of course, mean no service for wireless customers. In storm-prone places like the Midwest, losing coverage for an hour or more three days a week during the stormy season(s) could be a real issue.

Sky Station, which hopes to have a demonstration project in the air in 2005, has solved this problem by placing its aerostats above the weather. At 70,000 feet (about 14 miles up), a Sky Station would be nearly 4 miles above the tallest thunderheads and immune to their effects.

That's because unlike the tethered aerostats, which live between 5,000 and 10,000 feet in the sky and are connected to the ground by a cable (which also carries fiber-optic networking and power), the Sky Stations just float, held steady by onboard motors and GPS navigation.

The not-so-attractive Sky Station Web site explains the technology in tremendous detail, including answers to questions like, "What happens if the blimp crashes?"

THE TECHNOLOGY is too complex for me to really do it justice in this column. But I can answer one question, at least preliminarily: Will aerostats become common over big U.S. cities?

I don't think so, though the Sky Station idea seems to have merit. The issue isn't so much U.S. cities, but smaller communities and rural areas, where the SkyLinc technology could prove very useful. Internationally, aerostats have even more promise for bringing the Internet and wireless communications more generally to places where it's impractical or impossible to string cable or phone wires--China and Africa come immediately to mind.

This is technology that I'd like to use, but don't expect it anytime soon. There are too many problems, not the least of which is the fact that the concept sounds too weird to be real. But that's what I thought about 802.11 Wi-Fi until just before it exploded onto the scene in 1999 and 2000. Maybe I'll have to update my expectations about aerostats as well. I'd certainly like to.

What do you think? Can you imagine a gigantic blimp hovering overhead, handling all your wireless and broadband communications? TalkBack to me! 

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