Satellites, Balloons and other Air-Borne Transmitters

• VSAT foot prints
• No Cable? No D.S.L.? Try Satellite, NYTimes, Nov. 23, 2000.
• Satellite access
• Weather Balloons as Wireless Telephone Technology
• SansWire, a spherical balloon ("blimp") carrying 802.11 gear
• Sky Station (actually, a balloon at 20 - 30 km height)
• Angel Technologies: tag team of manned HALO (High Altitude, Long Operation) planes as orbiting communications platforms
• autonomous aircraft
• Planes at 52,000 ft
• 2-way pager
• DirecPc charges $0.60 per Megabyte for off-peak hours, $0.30 to $0.53 per Megabyte for the first 30 or 130 Megabytes per month (satellite delivery). One minute of 32 kb/s audio is 0.24 Megabytes. Equivalent phone costs (one way): 7 to 14 cents/minute, while typical U.S. long distance costs are around 10c/minute. DirecPC performance issues
• tart-Ups Pin Hopes on an Internet Route Through the Sky (NYT, 11/30/1998)
• SkyCache