
Google plans to beam 5G internet from solar drones - cryptoz
http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/30/google-project-skybender/
======
jonstokes
This can't get here fast enough. To people who don't really get why they're
doing this, or who think it only makes sense in undeveloped regions with no
cell towers, I wrote about this here:

[http://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2016/01/15/wisp-
tria...](http://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2016/01/15/wisp-trials-
waiting-for-the-balloons/)

Basically, if you think that in developed areas cell tower density has or
should have an inverse correlation with the cost of bandwidth, then you don't
live in the real world. There's a reason that there are only a few network
operators on most towers, and those guys get away with highway robbery in
terms of pricing and quotas.

Here is the money graf:

"It’s when I began seriously working on the cell tower option that the beauty
and inevitability of the balloon idea truly clicked for me. Don’t get me wrong
— on its face the Internet balloon idea is still actually nuts, but it’s
vastly better than the terrestrial alternatives, which are all terrible
because of one fatal problem: any moderately long-range wireless bandwidth
solution needs line-of-sight to work, which means you need elevation, and
(absent a viable balloon technology) elevation is a function of geography,
which makes it eminently exploitable by rent-seekers.

This geography-based rent-seeking, by both wireless carriers (via national
tower networks) and fixed-line ISPs (via cable, fiber, phone networks, and
trunk locations) is the only reason that bandwidth quotas exist in 2016, and
it’s what brings the Internet-of-balloons idea down from cloud cuckooland and
into the realm of inevitability."

~~~
malchow
I share your general optimism on sky-based broadband, but I have to admit that
I do not follow your argument about rent-seekers.

All physical space, even space in the sky, is in limited supply. So why does
the rent-seeking nature of cell towers make sky-based broadband inevitable?

I can see why sky-based broadband affords a huge competitive advantage,
allowing Google to beam 1gbps for $5/mo to the 15 million people who live in
Northern California.

But why does that make it more _likely_ to come to pass? Are balloon/drone
flight plans inevitably easier to file than zoning permits for cell towers?
Won't altitude eventually be auctioned off by the FCC? I fear that part of
what makes sky-based broadband attractive is the perhaps naïve notion that
government will always control the skies in the relatively light-handed way in
which it currently controls the skies.

~~~
jegutman
I think the reason rent-seeking is less of an issue in the sky (although I
don't have any opinion about viability) compared to the ground is that the
earth is not flat / smooth (also has buildings on it), but if you go even 1000
feet in the air there are no objects ruining line of sight. There's a lot of
sky. Even sky 1000 feet above a cliff side is sky, you probably don't want to
put a land-based cell tower there though.

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jokoon
I wish I could understand how engineers are able to transmit so much wireless
data at those distances, with so many devices at the same time.

I guess antenna technologies have improved a lot for the last 10 years, and I
still wonder where the subscription cost goes: are there patents for those new
types of antennas, are those antennas expensive to build, or does the cost
just reflect the amount of antennas installed and the infrastructure built to
achieve that wireless bandwidth?

Other question is, if you have solar drones, how much upload (from the device
to the drone) can you achieve, since batteries are still very much limited?

~~~
valarauca1
Google's Loon Project involves having the balloons float _over_ the weather.
So cloud cover isn't the issue. Batteries only have to function at night.
Furthermore each drone will in software limit itself to N active connections
(just like cell towers do), so you just use that N to calculate max battery
draw, then size batteries appropriately.

~~~
jokoon
I was talking about the battery of smartphones. In general smartphones are
good at receiving data, but not so good at sending it because their batteries
are very limited.

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DiabloD3
Where I live in Maine, this is a third world country when it comes to
connectivity.

The best you can get is about 25mbps when sitting right under our only cell
phone tower in town, it is about 0.5mbps _when I can get a signal_ at my
house.

My wired home Internet? 15/1 ADSL2. We have cable, they offer speeds up to
30/5 or so, but they force you to bundle it with cable TV to get speeds that
high, and I don't want cable TV in my house, nor do I want to pay >$100 for
internet only twice as fast; plus, during peak hours, the network falls apart,
our local ADSL2 network doesn't.

I've written to Google, trying to get them to deploy Google Fiber in Maine,
since we need it badly: we don't have a monopoly, we just don't have anything
recognizable as the Internet, not the way the rest of the US gets it.

Hopefully, they start deploying this in my area sometime in the next few
years.

~~~
agumonkey
are these figures in MB ? 15M down, 1M up ? (if so, tbh, this is above
comfortable IMO). How much that ISP is charging you for this plan ?

~~~
DiabloD3
15/1 in mbit. I always quote those numbers in mbit.

$45.89 currently.

~~~
agumonkey
Indeed, for that amount of money 15Mbit is anemic.

~~~
IMcD23
I grew up in rural Iowa. My parents are stuck with 3/1 for $85/mo. And it's
that or dial up.

~~~
DiabloD3
Is that with or without phone? I get local + in state + national calling +
that 15/1 for like $86.xx total/mo.

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zkhalique
I think we should be working more on improving consumer and enterprise
software for local area networks!

The global internet does not need the level of hops we are using to transmit
data. Things should be done locally first. I don't even want to say "offline
first" because the idea of a binary online/offline is again a symptom of
thinking that one is either "connected to the internet" or not, with the
former implying very comfortable access to the internet to get anything done.

We should be encouraging things like IPFS. Back in the day, usegroups and
other software did things better than the glorified mainframe approach of
today.

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joezydeco
So how come millimeter wave networking from Google is a good thing, but the
when the ex-Aereo guys announce a similar thing everyone is skeptical?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10984755](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10984755)

~~~
MiddleEndian
Maybe because the aero guys had legal issues with their last product. That
being said, as a Bostonian I am excited about this potential internet option.

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hackercomplex
Maybe this has already been asked, but the part that I struggle to understand
is what about TX ? I mean is a smartphone going to have enough wattage to beam
a message back to this drone ? If not then what's the plan for solving that
1/2 of the equation.

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rhino369
This only makes sense if you want to cover large sparse regions that don't
already have cell phone operators.

Tower range is getting smaller to reuse spectrum.

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timrpeterson
Honest statement: people in big orgs string together stuff in mad lib format
to get headlines. Speaking from personal experience, this is the way academics
works. From what I can tell there is a disproportionate amount of this amongst
the more stately corporations, IBM et al. too. I say this to advise
consideration about how much impact will come of such "impressive" projects.

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arcanus
Is 5G even an accepted standard yet?

~~~
gsteinb88
Not even close. Everyone and their brother has a "vision" for what it will
look like, but back in the real world there is nothing solid.

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grandalf
I expect that neither Google or Facebook will become a next generation ISP:

[http://vita.mcafee.cc/PDF/feint.pdf](http://vita.mcafee.cc/PDF/feint.pdf)

~~~
omegaham
I agree - the entire purpose of this is to _threaten_ other companies into
providing better service. Same exact thing with Google Fiber.

"If you don't provide service to our expectations, we will step in."

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melted
So how about them balloons tho? PR train running out of steam already?
Starting a new one? Pay no attention to ad revenue behind the curtain.

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acd
The future are super dense networks Lifi, 60GHz, then 5Ghz, then 2.4-1.8GHz
because that will give the most bandwidth for the buck. You always want higher
frequency first because it can carry more and then fall back to lower
frequencies if you are out of coverage of the high freq.

Outside developed areas there will be internet by solar drones and lower orbit
satellite internet.

~~~
ucaetano
The bandwidth doesn't depend on the frequency you're occupying, but on the
amount of spectrum available: you "usually" get in the order of 1 bps for
every Hz of spectrum available for mobile: a 20Mz chunk of spectrum will give
you ~20Mbps, no matter if it is 700MHz or 5 GHz. (Please notice that YMMV, LTE
gets several times that, illustrative, bla bla bla, etc.).

Higher frequencies have awful penetration and range, that's why today you
define who wins in the mobile game by the amount of 700MHz and 800MHz spectrum
they own. In other words, lower frequency spectrum is (within certain limits)
always better.

~~~
rayiner
Cellular network capacity is a function of channel width, modulation, and
spatial reuse. Because there are many more low-frequency channels of a given
width than high frequency ones, it's much easier to justify very wide channels
at higher frequencies. The better propagation of lower frequencies is also a
double edged sword. It's much easier to build a very dense cellular network if
cell sites far apart can't hear each other (causing co-channel interference).
Also, because higher frequencies propagate more directionally, it's also
easier to take advantage of spatial reuse techniques.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
> there are many more low-frequency channels of a given width than high
> frequency ones, it's much easier to justify very wide channels at higher
> frequencies.

Right conclusion, wrong (mis-stated?) premise. There are more high-frequency
channels of a given width than low-frequency ones. 700-800 MHz is a whopping
12.5% change, and it gets you 100 MHz to work with, but 5.725-5.875 is only a
2.5% change and gets you 150 MHz to work with.

~~~
rayiner
Yeah, meant that the other way around.

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agumonkey
pigeon + flashmedia > bad broadband
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm)

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zurn
Isn't millimeter just one of a zillion ideas that are being lobbied for 5G?

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agumonkey
Random question: Anyone in rural areas with mesh networks ?

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hartator
Didn't they already promised the MOON at some point?

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golergka
I have been toying with one fantastic idea lately. I know why it would seem
like a pure fantasy, and I'm not pretending that it's anything more at the
moment, but give it some benefit of a doubt.

It's quite simple. Imagine, just for a second, that current trillion
evaluations for all the unicorns will turn out to be true in some point in the
future. How can it be? What will be going on in this fantastic world? There's
only one possible explanation: internet ate everything.

The dotcom boom hanged on a very simple, explicit assumption: that internet
commerce is viable. That people actually will spend money on the internet. Of
course, it lead to a bubble, and that bubble burst, but the assumption itself
turned out to be correct. More than that: the valuation that NASDAQ have given
to the whole internet industry in the late 90s is a reality know. Of course,
individual 90s startups weren't worth that money, but internet industry as a
whole certainly is. Even if you judge it just by turnover, without even
looking at prospects of growth.

So, the first step of internet revolution that was promised by dotcoms already
happened. But what about the next step? No one is really talking about it,
because it's too fantastic to believe in and nobody wants to be laughed at.
But we know what it can theoretically be: the current wave of SV unicorns will
_eat_ their respective industries.

Imagine it. 90% of taxi industry is Ubers, Lyfts, Getts. 90% of book industry
is Amazon. (Wait, that almost already happened). 90% of TV is Netflix and
stuff. 90% of payments are Square and Paypal. 90% of hotel industry is AirBnB,
Booking.com and something else. Walmart have gone after Blockbuster, everybody
orders groceries with online drone delivery. Giant malls stand abandoned,
everybody's ordering from AliBaba. And so on.

Of course it sounds a little stupid; I drastically simplify it, so we can talk
about it without spending time arguing about inconsequential details. And
don't forget, all this is more like a fantasy right now.

But the point is, in this fantastic world such initiatives by Google, just as
free basics by Facebook have nothing to do with charity. Remember, how in the
90s, the only companies that really made money of internet were telecom
companies, because the only sure way to monetize an internet user was to
charge him for access? (Oh, and porn of course). In contrast, in this fantasy
world, the cost of internet access will become insignificant compared to all
the money you can get from a person with internet access. And in this fantasy
world internet corporations will gladly provide you the access for free. May
be they will still charge you a couple of cents for 100Mbps to 1Gbps upgrade,
but the 0 (zero) bps to 1Mbps upgrade will make so much money to them that you
have no chances of paying for it.

~~~
ceejayoz
You know you could've condensed that entire post down to "I think Internet
will eventually be free and subsidized by the companies that profit from the
usage of it."?

Hell, Facebook's already doing it with Internet.org.

~~~
golergka
Didn't have enough time to write it shorter, I'm afraid.

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volcrado
In the mean time, I am stuck at slow 3G. Are there regulations for the
frequencies at which they can transmit their services? Err?

~~~
thescriptkiddie
It's very strange that "3G" networks are so slow. HSPA+ supports 22 Mb/s and
has _better_ spectral efficiency than LTE, so why do we never see anything
approaching that in real life?

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tcdent
If your payload is power generation equipment, and you are able to stay
airborne for an indefinite period, is that not perpetual motion?

The usual preventative physics apply; friction, efficiency.

~~~
Shish2k
It takes energy from the sun, it doesn't generate energy internally

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rodionos
And the drones are going to stream pictures of me to google servers while
hovering over my head 24x7. Those pictures will be analyzed, A/B tested and ad
brokered to friendly ad-triggered on-demand services. Wall-e, red is the new
blue.

