4 ms·
Blimps would seem to be cheaper to deploy compared to satellites, and have much lower latency. How about drones delivering SD cards? The latency might be bad,
by xrange 12y ago
Blimps would seem to be cheaper to deploy compared to satellites, and have much lower latency. How about drones delivering SD cards? The latency might be bad, but you might still have a pretty high data rate.
- hawkice 12y agoSame problem, but worse: marginal costs would kill you with the drone delivered SD cards. Blimps... might be interesting. I feel like the blimps I've seen are so close to the ground they'd just be harder-to-maintain cell/WiMax towers.
- xrange 12y agoThe drone idea was just something crazy I threw out there for the heck of it, but now I'm kind of warming up to it a little more. Let's say you, the end-user, owns the drone, a one-time cost of let's make up a number of several hundred dollars. You give it instructions to download the next 10 episodes of your favorite netflix shows, etc.. It flies to your nearest library3 miles away where you've got an account, and it downloads it wirelessly while hovering overhead. It then flies back and land on your roof and acts as an access point for you. And maybe you share ownership of the drone with your neighbors. Or maybe there are 10 drones at the library waiting for commands that come over dialup to deliver your content. It flies to your place, where you download it while it hovers over your house for a few minutes, and then heads back. In that instance maybe the library owns the drones, and you just pay for a subscription? What marginal costs are you thinking would be the killer?
- hawkice 12y ago3 miles of fuel for a drone is the expensive part. The latency isn't great but I suppose that's a matter of taste.