Huge airships hovering miles above major cities could replace satellites as providers of telephone and Internet services in as little as five years, Britain’s meteorological office said on Monday.
The unmanned balloons would sit in the stratosphere — between 12km and 60km above sea level — keeping their position fixed by making use of solar-powered propellers and the vagaries of the weather in inner space.
”They will essentially be big, solar-powered blimps which hover in the stratosphere miles above our heads,” Mark Higgins, an innovations facilitator at the meteorological office, told Reuters.
”The benefit for phone companies is that they will cost a fraction of what it takes to send satellites up into space,” he added.
While the telecommunications technology has been tried and tested, the limitations of solar power and a rudimentary understanding of stratospheric weather systems have held back the balloons’ launch.
The meteorological office is working closely with two Britons who are attempting to fly a monster helium balloon to the edge of space this summer.
The hope is that meteorological tests carried out during the world record flight — up to 40 230 metres if all goes to plan — will improve high-altitude forecasting techniques and hasten the advent of commercial satellite balloons.
The first cities to be served by the balloons would be those near the tropics, such as Singapore and Los Angeles, where the stratosphere’s weather is more predictable and benign.
Test balloons are pencilled in for about five years’ hence and once the technology has been proven, it could be rolled out further from the equator, Higgins said.
Blimps relaying mobile telephone signals would allay many health concerns over receiver masts placed near homes and offices.
”It could change broadband and Internet services over a city, as well as mobile telephone networks,” Higgins said.
The meteorological office’s work on blimps is part of its recent efforts to expand its research into areas outside weather forecasting, including environmental sciences such as hydrology and oceanography. – Reuters