Any details about bandwidth and latency? Where are the gateway stations out of the balloon network? In the local region?
Project Loon
231–240 of 299 posts
Re: Project Loon
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoa?! Care to elaborate on that or at least point to a relevant link? You really made me curious...
He's slightly exaggerating, IIRC, but it's conceptually correct. Regarding the share structure, Google has two classes of shares, or maybe three by now. Class C shares don't get to vote, and I can't remember if they exist yet (IIRC they were voted into existence a year ago, but only pending various hurdles that I think might not have yet been cleared). Class B shares are worth 10x as much as Class A shares, for votin…
Class C shares don't exist yet...they're structured as essentially a stock split, where each class A shareholder gets an equivalent class C share that's non-voting, and so you'll see Google's stock price roughly halve when the transaction goes live.
Re: Project Loon
#233It's so encouraging to see a Hacker News comment section that is almost overwhelming informative and positive. I get varying amounts of flak for constantly posting about the quality and nature of HN comments, but as an unabashed optimist it means a lot to me to me.
Yeah, I'm looking for a discussion about technology and maybe somebody have an idea how latency would be. But all I see is typical comments you find in any social network.
Re: Project Loon
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Minor nitpick: AT&T has done a shit-ton of research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs edit: apparently a different beast than today's AT&T
AT&T spun off Bell Labs in the 90's as part of Lucent. Lucent was acquired by Alcatel. Alcatel shut down Bell labs in 2008.
Doesn't say that on Wikipedia, did I miss something? Looks to me like they're just shifting Bell Labs' focus from basic scientific research and focusing all research into computer science aspects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#2000s
Re: Project Loon
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Minor nitpick: The company now known as AT&T is essentially Cingular wireless; they bought the remnants of AT&Ts cell network and the rights to the name.
Actually that is the company now known as AT&T Wireless. The company now known as AT&T was one of the 24 'Baby Bells' that were created when antitrust regulators broke up AT&T (the one that created Bell Labs) in 1984. The company used to be known as SBC Communications but changed it's name to AT&T after acquiring what was left of AT&T (mostly long-distance phone services) in 2005. Through a long series of acquisition…
*its name
Re: Project Loon
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Minor nitpick: The company now known as AT&T is essentially Cingular wireless; they bought the remnants of AT&Ts cell network and the rights to the name.
Actually that is the company now known as AT&T Wireless. The company now known as AT&T was one of the 24 'Baby Bells' that were created when antitrust regulators broke up AT&T (the one that created Bell Labs) in 1984. The company used to be known as SBC Communications but changed it's name to AT&T after acquiring what was left of AT&T (mostly long-distance phone services) in 2005. Through a long series of acquisition…
Colbert explains it in detail: http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/955486/
Re: Project Loon
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Wireless is a hack It's been years since I've had a landline phone. I'm sure I'll eventually drop my landline high speed internet connection too.
It's a hack for the use case of basic connectivity. Your cell phone connects to a cell tower, which in turn connects to a trunk line. That's the proper way to do wireless. In the developing world, cell towers connect to other cell towers wirelessly. That's a hack. It's the reason why hotel Internet blows. Not its proper use case, engineering-wise. Service sucks but the customer base isn't discerning enough to notice…
Maybe you just had a bad experience with your provider in Atlanta. Webpass in SF is pretty awesome. 200mbps for 50/mo.
Re: Project Loon
#238"I love those who yearn for the impossible." -Goethe I wish other large companies showed such ambition. Telecoms like AT&T can't even be bothered to roll out the network upgrades they promised in the early 2000's.
Google deserves a lot fo credit but let's give something to Jerry Knoblach and his team: "His plan: Beam it down from balloons hovering at the edge of space. This isn't just hot air. His company, Space Data Corp., already launches 10 balloons a day across the Southern U.S., providing specialized telecom services to truckers and oil companies. His balloons soar 20 miles into the stratosphere, each carrying a shoebox-s…
Thanks for the history. For those only reading the excerpt, this article is from 2008.
Re: Project Loon
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Particularly over long, sparse networks, wired connectivity is not as cost effective as wireless connectivity, even including the cost of pole assets and antenna mounts. And data rates of > 1 Gigabit for wireless connections are readily achievable these days. [1] [1] http://www.bridgewave.com/solutions/whitepapers.cfm
The United States is a long, sparse country, one of the longest, sparsest countries on the globe. We are wired because running backbones over 3G blows. People say infrastructure is too expensive to build, it's not. When you have a discerning customer base with the purchasing power to demand it, infrastructure is the only way to serve it. Wireless cannot support that. As soon as the developing world stops being develo…
So, a couple things here.
#1 - The United States is wired for legacy reasons, our infrastructure was built 50+ years ago when wireless voice and data for the most part did not exist.
#2 - When I say "sparse" I'm referring to density of the target population, as in, the number of households per square mile.
It does make sense to run wired connections to dense urban populations, the cost-per-connection, particularly measured on a bandwidth-per-drop-per-dollar basis is great. Also, if you already have cable (either pairs of copper, or coax-for-TV) running to those people's homes, you've got a foundation for delivering data.
For most of the developing world in the next century (excluding the cities), communications, data, and entertainment will be in the form of wireless (Satellite, 3G, or directional 50 GHz+ data drops for backbones).
We won't be running cables to supply communities in the African countryside with high speed Internet. (We also won't be running it over 3G/LTE - which wouldn't be most people's choice for a wireless data backbone these days)