Google blimps will carry wireless signal across Africa

This is the greatest innovation since Virtudyne's "The Digital Donkey" [1] — which is a parody of SimIndiana [2]. There really have been donkey cart driven libraries. [3]<p>Of course, there really have been projects that used balloons in the upper atmosphere. It is actually difficult to maintain a balloon at a constant altitude in the upper atmosphere because you have to account for daily temperature variation and changing wind patterns. The most famous project of this sort was Project Mogul[4], which attempted to put a balloon in the atmosphere's analogue of the SOFAR channel to listen for anything that sounded like a nuclear test in the Soviet Union. One of the Project Mogul balloons crash landed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. The government's cover story was that it was a "weather balloon", which of course, it wasn't. But it wasn't an alien spaceship, either.<p>[1]: <a href="http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Virtudyne_0x3a__The_Digital_Donkey.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Virtudyne_0x3a__The_Digital_...</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2004/040707b.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2004/040707b.html</a><p>[3]: <a href="http://archive.ifla.org/V/press/pr0225-02.htm" rel="nofollow">http://archive.ifla.org/V/press/pr0225-02.htm</a><p>[4]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul</a>

And so it begins.<p>There is a new age coming, one where we <i>realise</i> surveillance is ubiquitous and more importantly carries benefits for us as well as loss of what we thought of as privacy.<p>This is probably a good thing. These blimps will not be the last of atmospheric and LEO orbitals that will criss cross the globe and provide always-on services we suddenly cannot live without.<p>We do need to manage who holds and uses information that relates to us personally, but in the end our children will always know where they and their friends are, will be able to look at any point on the globe instantly (want to see the giraffe running across the Serengeti <i>right now</i>) and the losses, well, we will deal with them. The benefits are going to be huge.<p>Tim Berners-Lee, look what you started.

I suspect it will be more mobile internet than desktops - you do have to realise that these dayse the African economy practically runs on mobile phones, and land lines are uncommon to nonexistent. I wonder how that changes the way they'll use internet access.<p>Speaking of how society uses the internet, I traveled through Ghana for four weeks last year and I heard that one of the reasons internet cafes aren't really wanted in smaller towns in Ghana is that people worried about it corrupting their youth, and not in the way you think: they worry about their children getting involved with the 419'ers[1].<p>And I must admit, I did see a lot of scammers in the smaller cafes, mostly teenage boys, often a few of them working together. Once I even witnessed a really well organised romance scam[2]: some would be setting up fake dating profiles, looking for pretty pictures of scantilly clad African women, some would be chatting with unsuspecting victims, pretending to be some kind of mail-order African bride (who sadly had a broken webcam), discussing how best to bait the victim, and there actually was a guy "managing" the whole group. It was crazy how coordinated the whole effort was.<p>Before this gets misinterpreted: I'm not saying you can't trust Africans who are online, obviously - most of them will be people with a higher education and internet at home or the university. I guess the problem with these small internet cafes is that the most likely early adopters are these 419'ers.<p>Anyway, I wonder how getting internet access to everyone will impact all of this. Maybe it will force the local governments to really start taking the problem seriously.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_scam" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_scam</a><p>[2] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_scam" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_scam</a>

That image of the Google blimp almost looks like the logo was photoshopped on. Any way to tell if that's real or not?

This article comes pretty close to plagiarizing the source article it's based on - <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323975004578503350402434918.html" rel="nofollow">http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732397500457850...</a>

This is so much more awesome than Glass, it defies description.

So is Google a carrier in these locales? Net net this is a Good Thing™ for access in Africa. Unfortunately soon Google and other carriers like them will be asked to implement all sorts of nasty filtering, censoring and generally anti-privacy tomfoolery. How will this play with their base back home in the good 'ole US of A? Recall how Yahoo got lambasted here for their cooperation with China. And they weren't even a carrier.

My girlfriend just asked a question that had not even occurred to me: what happens during a storm? I am sure Google's engineers have a way to handle that, but I am genuinely curious about what their solution is.

So Google gets hammered in several jurisdictions by driving a car with cameras around and now they are planning a blimp? I'm sure an intermediate cell network in disaster zones but full time RF surveillance? Why would a country agree to that?

This story seems very thinly sourced. I'm having trouble verifying it through reports in more reliable media outlets. The blog post by Google linked from the article doesn't have the same speculation that the article submitted here has.

As someone posting from rural Malawi on a perfectly fine internet connection based on the cellular network, why blimps?

I wonder if they've heard of these guys: <a href="http://ahumanright.org" rel="nofollow">http://ahumanright.org</a>. They had an interesting, albeit somewhat quixotic-sounding, campaign to buy a satellite (TerreStar-1: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerreStar-1" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerreStar-1</a>) for the same purpose. Unfortunately, the satellite was sold before they could raise enough money, but it looks like they're still around and contemplating ideas.

I thought when they hired Eric Brewer as VP of Infrastructure it was for his general CAP and high-scalability expertise. Maybe they hired him for his experience bringing wireless internet to developing nations / the third world...or both!<p><a href="http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu/drupal/" rel="nofollow">http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu/drupal/</a>

Now AFRICOM won't need to buy more bandwidth from china…

Does broadcasting an unwanted wireless internet across a nation's borders count as an act of war? If the US broadcast open Wi-Fi across North Korea's or China's borders, they would be unhappy. Something like Radio Free Europe.

Too bad mesh networking hasn't got off the ground in a big way (?). Couldn't individuals hoist weather balloons with mesh transmitters and build these sorts of networks bottom-up?

South Africa's digital TV migration has been held up for a few years, for various depressing, third-world reasons. Google seems to have found a workaround, according to the article, by detecting unused parts of the spectrum. Perhaps that's what will replace the "digital-TV dividend" in SA.

I wonder if they're taking precautions against the blimps being shot down.

Hmmm . . . possible connection to <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5754619" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5754619</a> ?

I'm curious, are there any plans to work with local providers? It would be a shame for African telcoms lose out to Google.

We need to design a phone that is cheap enough and runs on distributed wireless power + massive P2P Internet.

Doesn't using TV signals or satellite require special hardware that doesn't come on cheap android phones?

In related news, Larry Page now demands to be addressed as "Father Comstock" when in the GooglePlex.

In the areas where these blimps will be deployed, there almost certainly hasn't been the same discussions of privacy, tracking, corporate abuse, data breaches and perils of giving personal information out on the web nor the 20 years of background to go with it. You don't suppose Google will be educating the future web users to protect themselves from Google, do you?

Africa will be bigger than both India and China combined. There are whole cities waiting to be built. Check out the Solow growth model: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_growth_model" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_growth_model</a>

Something for the sheep standing on Zanzibar to look up at.

Now, if we could get them to feature NFL games :P

Only Google...

Pretty sure google should deploy wifi blimps to south/north Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, etc. before throwing resources at African wifi.<p>I guess google plans to inherit Nigerian family fortunes and such and only needs the coms infrastructure to obtain it.