Sounds to me like Google could cosy up quite nicely to Homeland Security on this one.

Why not use mesh topography with each users handset retransmitting data to a supernode then to back haul? Latency wouldn't be as much of an issue with the 700mhz internet access as it would be for voice. I understand the problems with this method (eavsedropping, hacking, disruption, legality, etc), but it seems like building a new cell network from scratch would have a few of its own problems. Google is the algorthym god right? Maybe they should attack network routing?

"Space Data Corp. The company, which provides wireless connectivity via hydrogen-filled balloons floating around the southern US,"

Space Data uses Helium and not Hydrogen in the balloons, hydrogen is not permitted in use with electrical equipment as it is very flammable, helium is not flammable.

A huge tower with a glowing Google eye on the top, similar to Sauron's tower

Google is a much bigger threat to privacy and competition than Microsoft yet nobody bats an eyelid, while I'm here I'll just state, I don't like them, I don't trust them and I don't use them.

It's smoke, and it's flames now, the frame is crashing to the ground, not quite to the mooring-mast... Oh, the technology!

@Demon

according to the linked wall street journal article, hydrogen is used

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120347353988378955.html

It makes a specific point of mentioning why.

use for a solar powered drone alleviating the need for all that fleshy service.

We've got photographs of men on the moon,

We've got water that is good for us,

We've got coffee that's instantaneous,

We've got buildings that are very tall,

We've got cigarettes that are low in tar,

We've got policemen can tell us who we are,

We can reproduce a work of art,

We've got missiles can tear the world apart,

Good, good, good, good, good, good technology.

Apropos of nothing, anyone here want to give me an hand to compile a database:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.talk.weather/tree/browse_frm/thread/044911dc9305a410/f92a0b2fcd4ef14d?rnum=11&_done=%2Fgroup%2Falt.talk.weather%2Fbrowse_frm%2Fthread%2F044911dc9305a410%2F602e810a6e5a50fb%3F#doc_602e810a6e5a50fb

In the spirit of FSF I won't be paying you. (Even if I could.)

I think there is only so much helium in the world ..... Every ballon popped = Helium lost for ever as it escapes into space

SAVE THE WORLDS HELIUM NOW

Brent,

Nice idea but it wouldn't work. The reason your mobile phone battery can be really small, and also last more than 5 minutes, is because it doesn't transmit very much, it transmits to a site with some huge receiving equipment, able to pick up very small signals, and the response back to you is pretty big, enabling your receiver to be small and low power. If handsets retransmit data, they would need much bigger power sources to do so.

Any idea how much power that dated hunk of space crystal, Pioneer, was sending out last time they received a signal from it?

March 3, 1972 Spacecraft launched.

March 2, 2002 Successful reception of telemetry. 39 minutes of clean data received from a distance of 79.83 AU.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_10

Whatever it was at source, 155W at launch, 140W by Jupiter (816,520,800 km 5.458104 AU) it was a lot less by bye bye's. And all decreasing by the square of its distance.

Presumably the equipment used on it was designed in the '60s and built some years prior to launch. Likewise the receivers would have been designed at least, in the previous millennium.

The point is that no matter how many moons they have to launch, these earthbound satellites can do the job. It is just a question of feasibility when other needs are factored in.

But the idea that it can be used as an aid in military communications makes it a certainty. The United States of Americans can't afford to ignore that implication, other countries won't.

The Yanks will need to be in the forefront of such technology just so they can maintain the ability to crush it if the need arose.

(And I am not saying they shouldn't.

How would it be if all the Africans who really need our help, rather than the East Europeans who don't, were able to communicate between pirate ships for instance? And sneak in to stay alive, as compared to everybody else who just want to come here to make their fortune?

We too need to be able to down their comms. It's a tradition.)

Mist transmitters.

A fog drifts over the city - nigh on invisible being it so thin and spaced out, high up as well.

Each droplet is a tiny transmitter, all of the millions of droplets together forming the mist - a giant floating grid transmitter requiring nothing more than wind and sun to move and have sufficient power for each droplet making the whole.

Who needs masts?

So these guys are sending up $2500 worth of equipment every day and just hoping that someone will retrieve it for a $100 bounty?

How sustainable is that? Also, what percentage of fallen balloons are recovered? Their "green" credentials wont be that great if there are hundreds of lost transmitters, all with batteries presumably, decaying away across the countryside.

Ah, the Red Guitars, Hull's great lost 80s band. Shame that almost all of the rest of their songs (including the b-side of Good Technology) was afro-tinged rubbish.

(Sorry if you were a member of the band, but it was, really.)

"we are assured of plenty of helium until the gas runs out"

Uhhh... Yeah. Good point.

So you're proposing a network that only works if there's a few other people in the relative vicinity. And one that bleeds a battery dry even if you're not using it? Doesn't get my vote in the mobile environment

(PS - el Reg - it's not a cell phone! This should have been banned long before the ill-fated "mobe")

You've got to love any company who's engineers seem to consist of farmers and nutters chasing gps balloons round fields

M$ take note

...and seeing Google, and their incredibly incredible tower of radio-ey goodness, the Lord smote them, for the Lord wanted the sandpit to [him|her]self.