GPS — LTA — Wireless — Thinking Outside The Box

I wrote sometime back about a Swiss firm who had a concept for an airship that is a lighter than air (LTA) craft that would fly at extreme altitudes and serve as a node in a wireless network. Think of a cellular site with a 13 or 14 mile tall antenna.

Well today’s news features a US company called “Sanswire Networks“. I’m amped. this concept and company are going to go places. First of all you just have to give them credit for the name. If you are going to call your network architecture “wireless” because it operates without wired connections, great. But the term “wireless” is so vague and misunderstood in today’s market that no investor or potential customer is likely to understand your concept without an eye-glazing PowerPoint session. But Sans wire? Ah, now that’s catchy, memorable and is the shortest “elevator pitch” on record. One of my favorite deserts here in the Philippines, a country with a lot of chefs and a lot of international cuisine is “Sans rival” a glorious concoction of cream and cake-like layers that is .. well is without rivals. If Sanswire keeps their ducks in a row and (literally) gets this off the ground they are going to be pretty well without rivals as well. A picture is worth ten thousand words, or so they say.

This is a High Altitude Airship (HAA) which will climb to 65,000 feet (nearly 20,000 meters), far above commercial air traffic altitudes. It’ll be powered by 100% non-emitting solar powered electric motors and it’s payload will be network electronics, Sanswire calls it a “Stratellite” (damn who comes up with these names there, the boss’s wife)? If you go to their web site and look at the prominent flash animation you’ll see that the footprint of one of these birds can cover the entire state of Texas. That’s a heck of a potential customer base.

Why not just make them true satellites? Well the cost differential alone is hugely against the orbiting satellite model and there are a lot of things you just can’t do with a satellite (like remain on station anywhere over the globe, for example). Even if a satellite could substitute in some ways there is a massive problem with delay. Geosynchronus satellites such as those used by TV broadcast absolutely suck (technical term there) for two-way communication because it takes nearly a second for the signal to go up to the bird and back down. The delay to 65,000 feet and back is imperceptible.

I like this concept and I like the fact that my favorite technology, GPS is one of the enabling technologies that make something like this popular. Nice concept, guys.