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Why not just use blimps?
Not sure you can have a solar powered blimp. It would rely on helium if hydrogen to float which would mean resupplying it on a regular basis as it will never be completely sealed and always have some slow gas losses over time.
Unless you can somehow have a lightweight solar powered hydrogen producing machine which splits water taken from the air.
Solar powered blimps can use hydrolysis to break apart water and get hydrogen using electricity from solar panels. That same hydrogen can then be used for both buoyancy and as energy storage using fuel cells to turn it back into electricity when needed.
That’s what first came to my mind. Water from air to hydrogen from water. Would need to do r&d tho to see if it’s possible.
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Pretty sure the only R&D you need to do is thermodynamics 101.
Is the energy from the sun that could be harvested from a blimp sized footprint enough to convert enough hydrogen to account for the leaks in a blimp and to power propellers to keep it in one spot.
I don’t know those numbers.
There is no word on pricing, but I wonder how much each drone might cost? They don’t look particularly complicated. Even if each of them cost $100,000, that would provide blanket 5G coverage to all of Africa for $15 billion. For context, the total 2024 telecoms spending in Africa is expected to be $63 billion.
I haven’t read about this, but I suspect this is going to be more useful for low population density areas. There is usually a connection cap that will be far too low for any kind of urban use. That’s okay, though. It’s usually easier and cheaper per user to have ground-based installations in an urban setting. This could be a great option to extend coverage in rural zones.
Same for Starlink. There’s only so much bandwidth even a very modern antenna can have. And something flying is going to be power-limited as well.
It sounds like a Starlink satellite costs more than a million dollars, so that’s a pretty good deal if so. I wonder why this isn’t a thing already?
Facebook tried something similar: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Aquila
Project Loon, too. The idea isn’t new, and I kind of wonder why it’s more viable now.
Lower solar/battery costs?
I doubt that’s the most (financially) expensive component in any of these cases. Making stuff fly is pricey, and maintaining high-bandwidth radio connections can be too.
Something like this would be perfect. The higher in altitude you can get these things, the wider an area they can cover. However, that means more people will be on them. So there is a trade-off between square mileage of coverage and number of people connected.
