3 ms·
I wonder (a) how many simultaneous connection the balloon can sustain and (b) how they're storing power.
by matt4077 12y ago
I wonder (a) how many simultaneous connection the balloon can sustain and (b) how they're storing power.
- digikata 12y agoYup, it's easy to reach a large area, but it's hard to do that and service a high density of customers/connections at the same time...
- superuser2 12y agoTrue, but the interesting use case is probably low population density areas where building towers is not practical. In that situation, you probably wouldn't need many concurrent connections.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoOr use high bandwidth spot beams similar to satellites as backhaul for ground nodes.
- teraflop 12y agoI don't think energy storage is that big of a deal. Assuming you need only need to store one night's worth of energy, the weight requirements would be about 85 grams/watt for lead-acid batteries, or 25 grams/watt for lithium-ion. For comparison, commodity solar panels are already about 70 g/W.
- seanflyon 12y agoI think you mean 25 grams/Watt-hour and keep in mind that you need ~12 hours of energy storage.
- teraflop 12y agoNo, I meant grams/watt, but I glossed over how I derived those numbers. My back-of-the-envelope assumption was that you get 4 effective hours of daylight per 24 hours. Which means that for every 1W of power generation at peak, you get 1/6W of average power consumption, which translates to 3.33Wh of storage to keep things running overnight. (For a land-based installation you would probably want a multiple-day power reserve to handle cloudy days, but I'm assuming that's not an issue for a stratospheric balloon.)
- seanflyon 12y agoSo you mean 25 grams of battery per watt of solar panels?
- bduerst 12y agoWhat about using microwaves to transfer energy or charge the balloons?
- minthd 12y agoI think the maximum with lte-advanced and 5 carriers is around a million simultaneous connections.