Sanswire's airship comms platform looks like a bag of hot air

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 26 July 2007 09:07

Opinion and Analysis

Sanswire Networks, a subsidiary of US based GlobeTel Communications Corporation, has for several years been touting its vision of putting airships into the stratosphere fully equipped with radio transceivers and associated electronics to act as "base stations in the sky." That grand vision has now been downgraded, and seriously delayed.

Australia was to be the lucky first recipient of this technological breakthrough. In 2004 an Australian consortium, Sanswire Australia secured the rights to operate Stratellites in Australia announced plans to launch the first Stratellite in 2005.

Each Stratellite would be held stationary in the stratosphere and remotely controlled from tracking stations on the ground. Each was designed to stay in one location for up to 12 months, when it would be replaced by a duplicate Stratellite, allowing the original airship to be brought back to earth for servicing and communication upgrades. Each Stratellite was to be approximately 70 metres in length, have a payload capacity of "thousands of pounds", and be powered by a series of solar powered hybrid electric motors and other regenerative fuel cell technologies.

From its planned operational height each Stratellite would have clear line-of-site communications capability to an entire major metropolitan area as well as being able to provide coverage across major rural areas. Sanswire suggested that each Stratellite could be used as a platform for any current wireless technology: cellular, 3G/4G mobile, MMDS, paging, fixed wireless telephony, HDTV, real-time surveillance, etc.

Sanswire said it intended to operate its own communications payload on the Stratellite as well as offering it to other customers as, in effect, a 'tower in the sky'. A company spokesman said that Sanswire was "in advanced in discussions with one vendor for our part of the payload for WiMAX technology to carry voice and video" and "we could also potentially run emergency services based on APCO25 and TETRA [respectively the US and European digital trunked mobile radio standards]. The potential also exists for 3G, 802.11."