Flying Cell Towers for Lower-Latency

When the inevitable Kessler Syndrome cascade sweeps Starlink and its competitors from Low Earth Orbit in what will doubtless be a spectacular meteor shower of debris, the people behind Sceye and its competitors are going to be laughing to the bank. That’s because they’re putting their connectivity rather lower than orbit — in the stratosphere, with high-altitude dirigibles.

The advantages are pretty obvious: for one, the dirigible isn’t disposable in the way the very-low-orbit satellites Starlink and its planned imitators use. For another, the time-of-flight for a signal to get to a dirigible 20 km up is less than a tenth of the time it takes to get 480 km up — and that affects latency. Thirdly, the High Altitude Platform System (HAPS) concept won’t require any special transmitters. Regular cellular modems using ordinary 4G and 5G bands and speeds are usable, which eliminates a big barrier to rollout.

If this all sounds a bit familiar, and even dated, perhaps that’s because it is — Google tried to beam internet down from the stratosphere with its Loon project, before shutting it down in 2021. One of Loon’s major shortcomings was reliance on the shifting winds of the upper atmosphere, something the new generation of dirigible stations won’t have to worry about.

Of course, until the positive feedback loop of satellite collisions creating debris that begets yet more collisions that we call a Kessler Syndrome — which we’ve written about in arcade form, oddly enough–one could also use these HAPS stations as a bridge between space-based and ground-based networks.

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