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posted by cmn32480 on Friday September 30 2016, @08:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the get-yer-pellet-guns dept.

Google, which is hoping to beam the internet to remote areas of the world via balloon, went before the UN's aviation agency to ask member states to let it ply their airspace.

The company's X Lab, which was created to pursue big-vision projects, said it hopes to establish a network of helium balloons floating in the stratosphere that will emit a powerful 4G signal to rural and difficult-to-access areas.

The new initiative—launched in 2013 and dubbed "Project Loon"—saw its first balloon take off from South America in February only to crash at a tea plantation in Sri Lanka, where it was discovered by villagers.

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, had partnered with Sri Lanka to bring the internet to remote areas there. The country's Information and Communication Technology Agency, which coordinated the tests with Google, described the landing as controlled and scheduled.

Why not build a giant transmitter on the Moon?


Original Submission

Related Stories

Google Kills Off Titan Internet Drone "Moonshot" 8 comments

One of the Google X "moonshots", a plan to use solar-powered drone aircraft to provide Internet connectivity to rural areas, has been axed. Some of the engineers may be reassigned to Project Loon and other efforts:

Back in 2014 Google (now Alphabet) bought Titan Aerospace, a company specializing in solar-powered drones that could fly at high altitudes for long periods of time. The goal was to offer internet access to rural areas that lacked connectivity by beaming it down from on high. In that way it was similar to another moon shot, Project Loon, and to Facebook's Aquila.

Today, however, Alphabet confirmed to Business Insider that it had ended its exploration of solar-powered drones. In fact according to a spokesperson, the project ended almost a year ago. That would make it part of a big group of setbacks for X, formerly X Labs, the incubator for wild ideas that has suffered under the strict financial discipline being imposed by Alphabet and its CFO, Ruth Porat. Bloomberg offered a rundown of the high-level departures that have occurred since the creation of Alphabet as a holding company and the separation of X from Google

Also at 9to5Google and Bloomberg.

Previously: Google Releases New Project Loon Video
Google to Provide Sri Lanka with 3G Internet Using Balloons
Facebook's Laser Drones v Google's Net-Beaming Balloons
Google May Test Balloon Internet Service Over the United States
Google Testing Project Loon: Concerns Are Without "Factual Basis"
Google Asks for Airspace Access for Internet Balloons


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @09:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @09:31PM (#408535)

    God fucking damnit NOOOO!
    Is there nowhere left where you're not mandatorily touching a GOOG/Alphabet asset? Can't these fuckers just leave people alone instead of having to touch me anywhere I go?

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Chromium_One on Friday September 30 2016, @09:42PM

      by Chromium_One (4574) on Friday September 30 2016, @09:42PM (#408538)

      I know this is scary, but we need you to be brave. Please show us on the doll where the bad advertising company touched you ...

      That said, despite Google's numerous and continuing failings, they're probably in the best position to be doing something like this with getting good networking everywhere. So if not them, then who would you rather see doing this? Or would you prefer to say that the (non-monetary) cost is still too high for the moment?

      --
      When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @09:49PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @09:49PM (#408543)

        *touches her entire body* everywhere, sir and it makes me feel icky!
        I think your assumption that this is a thing that needs to be done, is wrong. I don't think this is a thing that needs to be done, that humanity is waiting for, or that would advance anyone in any way shape or form. So to answer your second question "if not them, then who", my answer is: no-one.
        My answer has got nothing to do with monetary cost but everything with human cost. This will only be used to sell you useless baubles and worthless trinkets. This is not something humanity needs.

        • (Score: 2) by Chromium_One on Friday September 30 2016, @11:51PM

          by Chromium_One (4574) on Friday September 30 2016, @11:51PM (#408590)

          Ubiquitous world-wide network access is ...
          Useless? No.
          Worthless? Seriously, no.
          Necessary? Oh hell no.
          Inevitable? Probably.
          Soon? Probably not.
          Has lots of tradeoffs and political footballing involved? Definitely, at least under current conditions.
          Used only to sell useless baubles and trinkets? Sure, let's pretend you're right and that the Intarwebz begin and end at Amazon, eBay, and the like.
          No privacy of any sort with Teh Goog as the provider? Variable. They do better than some and far worse than others. I don't like the pervasive data capture that goes far, far beyond what's either reasonable or needed for their core business (advertising, with lots of nifty side projects) but they do limit what they share outside of their organization. Workarounds are available, though they do require effort, edjumicashun, and vigilance.

          On the topic of human costs, care to share further concerns?

          --
          When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.
    • (Score: 2) by rigrig on Saturday October 01 2016, @02:31AM

      by rigrig (5129) Subscriber Badge <soylentnews@tubul.net> on Saturday October 01 2016, @02:31AM (#408627) Homepage

      Google is not in the ISP business to make money.
      Google is in the internet-advertising business.
      People with no internet make no money for internet-anything businesses.
      The best way to connect internet-less people to the internet is to provide them with significantly[1]-above-cost internet[2], and wait for cost-effective ISPs to realise they can make money by providing cheaper internet.

      [1] but not excessively
      [2] Which people will gladly use, as long as it's the only internet.

      --
      No one remembers the singer.
      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Saturday October 01 2016, @04:02AM

        by frojack (1554) on Saturday October 01 2016, @04:02AM (#408653) Journal

        Google is not in the ISP business to make money.

        Then why Google Fiber? I suspect they DO make money where they install this.
        And why fly Balloons over people who haven't got enough income to buy anything. You can't sell anything to penniless people. (Although they may be perfect targets if you want to encourage click-fraud.)

        Its hard to figure what Google's game is here. You might think Facebook would be the first entrant into the low income end of the pool. But I can't see any real game plan for Google in going after the low end of the market.

         

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2016, @01:59PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2016, @01:59PM (#408771)

          "Its hard to figure what Google's game is here". I disagree. GOOG profiles, correlates identites and warehouses data, then sells access to them. More people, more identities, more data, more moneh? Search engine result manipulations are a propagandists dream tool of soft, long-term manipulation of public opinion. Ensuring that one owns the pipes ensures permanent access?

          As for crazier things... Google/doubleclick is a part of american State. I'd say the usual game, american domination of everything, for the sake of extracting profit and creating suffering.

          • (Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday October 02 2016, @09:27PM

            by frojack (1554) on Sunday October 02 2016, @09:27PM (#409151) Journal

            disagree. GOOG profiles, correlates identites and warehouses data, then sells access to them.

            No, you've got that wrong.

            Google pushes ads to people, but does not give the advertiser information about those people. (I've advertised with google for my day job. You get nothing back from them about who saw the ads, and you don't get anything back about who clicked the ads either unless you pull it from your own servers.

            So your impression about google's game plane here is all based on faulty assumptions.

            At most google gets a few pennies or tenths of a penny per clicked ad. They get nothing for an "impression". So if you advertise to people who can't buy your product, you get no clicks, and google gets not fees.

            --
            No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @09:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @09:34PM (#408537)

    Are you simple?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @10:20PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @10:20PM (#408560)

      "Simple"?

      Are you 70?

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by EQ on Friday September 30 2016, @09:46PM

    by EQ (1716) on Friday September 30 2016, @09:46PM (#408540)

    Kids these days...

    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday September 30 2016, @09:51PM

      by frojack (1554) on Friday September 30 2016, @09:51PM (#408544) Journal

      Especially those who can't detect a joke when they see one.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 2) by Valkor on Friday September 30 2016, @09:53PM

      by Valkor (4253) on Friday September 30 2016, @09:53PM (#408547)

      What's wrong, the speed of light aint good enough for ya?!

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @09:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @09:52PM (#408546)

    Because it would be nice to send data back too..

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @11:52PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @11:52PM (#408591)

      this. besides, its only up half the time, and then half of it days and half of it nights.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2016, @09:16PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2016, @09:16PM (#408874)

      Yeah, but if you build a big enough dish, rather than just tossing kilowatts at it, you could send data back with practical terminals on the ground. You'll still need those kW for downlink speed, but a slow uplink and fast downlink is okay for ordinary use, so it's actually doable. (Of course, any requests that cannot be served from the moon need two round-trips, enjoy your 5000ms latency...)

      I'm picturing Arecibo* on the moon, and 2.4GHz frequency, just for scratch calculations, though you'll obviously prefer not to run this in the ISM band.

      Let's assume the portable terminal has an EIRP of 5W -- could be a 5W+ handheld unit with an approximately isotropic antenna, or a 1W stationary unit with a roughly aimed patch antenna. That's 37dBm for a baseline terminal, but we'll keep in mind that we can improve that to permit faster uplinks for fixed stations -- the power can easily be increased to 10W (+10dB) and the gain can be improved with a yagi, helical, or small dish antenna (+5-10 dB or more), without making aiming particularly demanding.

      Free space loss is 212dB; Arecibo's gain is 72dBi.

      Received power, then, is 37-212+72 = -113 dBm, of course we need some margin, so let's call our desired receiver sensitivity -125dBm.

      That's far too weak for, say, a commodity WiFi receiver, but is comparable with typical GPS receivers, which have sensitivity of -130dBm. Since the lunar average surface temperature is about 200K (-75°C or -100°F), it should be pretty easy (with a buried heatsink and heatpipes) to enjoy substantially reduced noise floor without the complexity of active cooling or the need for periodically refilling a cryogenic tank; this alone will allow substantially better bandwidth than GPS.

      The big problem, really, is beam width, and that's at least as big a problem for downlink as uplink. Arecibo has a beam width of 0.028°, which sounds narrow, but that's 120 miles on Earth. Imagine how may users of this service will be in that 10000-mile2 circular footprint directly under the moon (and yes, it gets worse for peripheral regions, where it becomes a 120-mile wide, 1000-mile long oval), and figure out how to serve them all at once. Even if you say it's only used in absurdly rural areas with a density of, say, 1 terminal per 30 or 40 acres, that's 20000 users. If you want to provide downlink corresponding to a 28.8k modem, that's 600Mb/s! Yes, you'll oversubscribe by 10:1 or so, so it's only 60Mb/s -- over a 400,000 km, 212dB link! Consider receivers to have sensitivity of -75dBm (typical of 802.11g receiver at 54Mb/s), you'll need a transmit power of 65dBm, or 3kW with no link margin at all, and more realistically 75dBm or 30kW. You can alleviate this somewhat with FDMA, allowing each receiver to have reduced bandwidth and thus better sensitivity, but really, you need a smaller beam width, so you need a bigger dish.

      The big question, of course, is why would you do all this on the moon, when you can much more cheaply put a similar transmitter with a smaller dish on a geosynchronous satellite and get much better performance in all aspects -- and not have it disappear under the horizon 12 hours a day. It's not that the moon thing is implausible, it just offers zero compelling advantages.

      * Not just for convenience in finding real figures, but also because it's a reasonable design choice. One might prefer a fixed parabolic dish for higher performance, and at first it sounds okay; since the Earth's apparent size is only about 2°, you might not expect to need Arecibo's ±20° steerability. But lunar libration adds over ±10° thoughout the month, so we really do need a similarly steerable design. You might take advantage of the moon's lower gravity (and the absence of wind loading) to use a much longer focal length, with the feed correspondingly higher, thus reducing spherical aberration, but you're not really changing it dramatically.

  • (Score: 2) by Max Hyre on Saturday October 01 2016, @09:25PM

    by Max Hyre (3427) <{maxhyre} {at} {yahoo.com}> on Saturday October 01 2016, @09:25PM (#408875)
    It would be so simple for them to block certain undesirable websites. With them defining `undesirable'. Think of the children (to say nothing of the profits)!