you know what would be fun, take a bb gun and take those suckers down

cant they just strap the balloons down and keep them in one place??? and every so often check/replenish them?

But then you'd constantly be finding the balloons after they fall out of the sky and relaunching them

@MadColombian: Yeah i was thinkin itd be easier to just tether them but either way its a cool idea.

The following comes from the WSJ article.

"The inexpensive balloons are good for only 24 hours or so before ultimately bursting in the thin air of the upper atmosphere."

Replacing these things every day seems impractical, so does Google plan to create balloons with a higher life span?

double coat them with the elastic, make it thicker, seal it with something on the outside, what happens if there is a large storm in the area, it would be kinda bad to have a big ass network ontop of the ocean

@MadColombian: Teathering them all together would not acheive the desired end. It seems to me that the point is to spread them out across the country so that more people can have internet access. Also if you were to teather the balloons, wouldn't the VERY long string pose a serious danger to aircraft? Also, the string would most likely put unnessary stress on the balloon, decreasing the already short life span.

No accusations of Grandfaloonery here.

ok so this sounds awesome lets just launch some hydrogen baloons into the air anyone remember something called the hindenberg that had hydrogen hydrogen is also very very explosive so what happens if one of these explodes thats really good

I'm guessing the subscription revenue is greater than the cost per balloon, making it a profitable ratio if only 6 - 9 balloons can effectively cover the area the size of Texas. 100,000 subscribers in one state vs. 6 - 9 low cost balloons. I'm all in.

@takemetoyourtoaster: The more weight you add, the more gas you need to lift the balloon. One would need to make a very large balloon in order to compensate for the added weight.

@bwilliams18: One of the articles specifically states that these balloons are not even comparable to the hidenburg.

Hydrogen is, of course, flammable, but Mr. Knoblach says there's no safety issue because each balloon contains so little gas. "It's not like the Hindenburg," he says
[online.wsj.com]

@bwilliams18: I think what you meant to say was:

ok so this sounds awesome lets just post some rambling statment without reading the farking article anyone remember the punctuation because i forgot all of mine due to the fact that i fail at life

Now that I've taken 2 tylenol to take the bite off of bwilliams18's post, I just wanted to say that I'm bummed that they're using these little ballons instead of something cool like the Aerostats from TCOM. I'm especially bummed about that because I live just a few miles from TCOM's facilities, and would LOVE to work for them, especially on a contract for Google.

/NERD

BWilliams, more people died in a crash involving the helium-filled USS Akron than in the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg. In the Hindenburg's case, few fatalities involved the fire or explosion, just the fall to the ground.

Hydrogen goes boom, but at normal pressures, it's not going to make a very big boom; it's just too light and ends up going everywhere too fast for a real fun explosion.

Can we ban him?

That seems a bit harsh to me.

Durr... forgot linkage to pics of the TCOM baloons. They can keep them airborne for a month at a time, though at much lower altitudes than these little weather-baloon dealies.

[images.google.com]

Linkage to TCOM's site:

[www.tcomlp.com]

@gelatinous: Yes, but banning is fun?

@gelatinous: True, banning is a bit much. Perhaps just a quick Louisville Slugger to the kneecaps to keep him in line.

@tehronin:
@DirkusMaximus: I am prepared to pretend that this little incident never happened as long as he refrains from posting in the e e cummings style.

@gelatinous: I suppose we should let him live. I am sincerely hoping for a poorly written rebuttal to those who have called him out though, just so he can make his failure complete.

Wouldn't it be more cost effective to make more t-com style blimps with solar panels and just park those in the air?

Knowing Google they'll probably stick a clown hat and a face on the balloons and charge Jack in the Box $400 for 'em.

FWIW, we only ban people when they are being offensive and total douchebags, but never when they show a) ignorance, b) idiocy, c) lack of punctuation or d) all of the above.

This may change without notice, though.

Dear Google,
I have a cost effective alternative:

$200 finder's fee for Space Data Corp's ballons + $50 to relaunch!

I've been reading about these damn balloons to bring us ubiquitous WiFi for years. I'll believe it when I see it. Always the low-cost aspect is mentioned, too. So... I pray it's low-cost for the consumer if it ever comes to fruition.

Balloons work great! Remember the last time when we took a man to the moon with one?!

So these 6 lb. wireless transmitters are going to come crashing down to earth? If one cannot control where they will be blown (leaving it up to the weather), then how does one know they won't be plummeting into congested areas? Will Google pay to fix a hole in a roof?

And is it still considered littering if they're "throwing away" latex balloon material from way up high? This doesn't sound very environmentally economic.

Read the article. They have parachutes.

could be cool, but the cost will add up real quick. Dont forget the cost to pay employees to watch over these balloons and im sure there are some aviation concerns also.

[www.sanswire.net]

Google could just use something like that.

@Jesus Diaz: I very much enjoy it when the Gizmodo elite mingle amongst us. (Yes, I worship at the Altar of Celebrity.)

For some reason, this seems flawed.

Great! Much easier for people to sabotage the balloon network than those undersea telecom cables

Assuming the recievers are recovered by the $100 finders fee (which will spawn a whole new industry in and of itself - balloon hunters)... thats $150 per day per balloon. If they can really achieve US coverage with just shy of 400 balloons, thats a wireless network with a $60,000 a day maintenance fee, which I am guessing is waaaaaaay below the upkeep on cell tower networks.

It will suck when a windy day knocks out the internet for the entire western US though.

While this seems like a real cool and neat idea, it also seems a little unconventional and flawed at the time. Is it really that much cheaper than towers to keep replacing these balloons every day?
This all just seems a little odd to me, though still pretty cool.

Something that I wrote on August 10th on my blog.
Final ingredients to the story

* Stratellites is a project, is a buzz word, it's a lot of hype around it in the specialized blogs, but if you go around the hype maybe there is something here.
* Wimax is a lot more known. I really hope it won't have the same "success" like the ATM which was supposed to replace all protocols before year 2000 :)
* VOIP which is one step towards service convergence.
* Lossy codecs for audio and video as in ogg, mp3, aac+, xvid, divx, H264 you pick one or more.

Let's start dreaming

What do I want from a service like the one envisioned 10 years ago?

* I wish to be able to call anyone and be called for a very reasonable price per minute.
* I wish to be able to use that device as a "modem" for my laptop (maybe the 100$ laptop but this is another dream).
* I wish to have enough download and upload speed for a videoconference (no HDTV quality needed, VGA will do just fine)
* I wish to be able to be located if needed by using the GPS, GALILEO constellations.

And that's pretty much it.

Now, assuming that the strattelites are working as promised, the VOIP and WIMAX devices are working perfectly without any servicing needed what would be the strategy to implement a service like this.

Ideally you could get all the big gsm telcos at one table: the european ones (Vodafone, Orange), the japanese NTT, the US TMobile and Verizon and so on and they should put their financing power behind a project like this.
I wonder how many calls are placed simultaneously in a 6 millions subscribers network. 100000? 200000? 1000000? Do not know. But according with the guys with the stratellites, one airship will cover a lot of space (average european country). Is it possible to have a "PABX" inside an airship like this which should deal with the average number of calls using VOIP and Wimax? Anyway I do not have the necessary data or experience to make the right assumptions here, but I am allowed to dream.
I am sure that if the project is possible the operating costs for an airship like this would be cheaper than the cost of maintaning the ground network for any GSM or CDMA operator. And the end I would have only a VOIP phone which I can use with Skype or Vonage at home and then if I am on top of the mountain I can still use it.

jeeze man, this thread got real violent, real fast...

@takemetoyourtoaster: Wow, yeah... that would be fun. You could even post a video of it to... Wait, what's that? You can't post a video of it because you now have no internet connection? Well, crap.

Am I the only one put off by the idea of hundreds of "shoebox-sized electronics packages" falling down on us from the stratosphere on a daily basis? Everyone's talking about recovering the balloon, but that's been destroyed...I would like to know a lot more about how effective these parachutes are before I embrace a technology that aims 6-pound payloads at my head from 20 miles up.

I also don't think google is enough of a socially responsible company for me to just look the other way while they drop shit on land that doesn't belong to them. If I did that, it'd be littering. If my company did that, it'd be "dumping." For google, it's just a new business model?

@takemetoyourtoaster: Seeing as these things will be floating near the edge of the atmosphere at somewhere near 80-100 thousand feet you'll need a bit more than a BB gun.

This, of course, makes for a great excuse to buy one of those "Wicked Lasers" units.

[www.wickedlasers.com]

I've done a goodly number of skydives, and if a parachute can get people out of the sky reliably, then I wouldn't be too concerned about a 6 lb shoe box. (It is common practice for skydivers to jump with a device that deploys a reserve chute at a specific altitude if it detects that no chute has been deployed. These things are pretty darn reliable as they are designed to save lives.)

For a 6 lb device the chute would be really small, and a backup chute probably wouldn't even be a problem.

(But of course, that doesn't fix the littering. Or the winds. We call students wind drift indicators.)

@microserf149: The Marine in me is thinking of all the times I've seen equipement, including parachutes, fail, and mulitplying that times hundreds per day, and still would like to know a little bit more.

If you did 400 jumps a day every day how often would you expect a problem requiring a reserve chute?

man, if they actually lauch this, i'm so going to apply for the 'google balloon shooting down' division at ATT or Verizon. that plus booze would be my dream job.

If Nortel or Nokia NSN could make a cell tower that had only $1500 in parts, then they'd be raking in the dough, not bordering on bankruptcy.

Couldn't an African or European Swallow grasp it and fly it around? I mean a coconut is heavier than 6 lbs.

i had balloons at a birthday party once.. once...

it's no as easy as launching balloons a coverage area of what they showed is a lot of POPs one balloon would cover...a little box like that can handle that kind of traffic? I find that highly optimistic when terrestrial based cellsites that cover less than 1 mile in an urban area see major capacity issues this balloon thing just doesnt make sense. Especially if it's carrying more than just voice traffic.

why cant they just attached these things to planes in the skies. Im sure the airlines would take the money. and for sure there are more planes in the skies at a time compared to the amount of ballons.

let's say it takes 750 cell towers to provide service to a state (let's not nitpick the size or population of the state). That's 37,500 towers to cover the mainland, Hawaii and Alaska. I've read on the interwebs that 600 towers would provide NC with 100% coverage but I'm not sure of that figure so don't quote me on this. Now if you take high volume areas like NYC or LA and factor in rural Texas and states like Rhode Island, I would say maybe 30,000-40,000 total towers would be more than enough. Using the 37,500 figure, at $2.5 million a piece (I've seen various figures ranging from $70,000 to $2 million) to build a tower, that would cost: $93,750,000,000. That's a huge up front cost. Consider this: the United States government just spent something in the ballpark of $170 billion to give the citizens a Tricky Dick Fun Bill, maybe if they were to spread this out over the course of 10 years, they could fund the construction of all these towers, allowing Telcoms to cover maintenance and operating costs. And a lot of areas already have decent coverage so total costs may be much, much less.

@bwilliams18: hi there. I'd just like to introduce you to the following members of the ASCII character set: . , ? ! ;

HAND

Most commenters on this article kinda have it all wrong, I doubt they're going to be using the existing balloons to do their network.

We have to take a look at the companies Google has bought to see complimentary technologies.

This would most likely be first used for Google Maps for low altitude images. Could also be used for data collection for weather monitoring services at a much lower cost. Doppler with video anyone?

Well, you have to give them credit for thinking outside the box. But wouldn't it be easier to just put them on top of residential houses and give the owner of the house free access?

I look forward to stories of daring balloon retrievals.

@Bzzzy: Kudos to you for the Monty Python reference!!