About the Stratellite Crackpot? Or smart money?

A Stratellite is a high-altitude airship that when in place in the stratosphere will provide a stationary platform for transmitting various types of wireless communications services currently transmitted from cell towers and satellites. It is not a balloon or a blimp. It is a high-altitude airship.

Made of Space age Materials and powered by solar powered electrical engines, each Stratellite will reach its final altitude by utilizing proprietary lifting gas technology. Once in place at 65,000 feet (approx. 13 miles) and safely above the jet stream, each Stratellite will remain in one GPS coordinate, providing the ideal wireless transmission platform. The Stratellites are unmanned airships and will be monitored from the Company’s Operation Centers on the ground.

A Stratellite will have a payload capacity of several thousand pounds and clear line-of-sight to approximately 300,000 square miles, an area roughly the size of Texas .

The Stratellite is similar to a satellite in concept, but is stationed in the stratosphere rather than in orbit. Existing satellites provide easy “download” capabilities, but because of their high altitude are not practical for commercially viable “two-way” high-speed data communication. The Stratellite will allow subscribers to easily communicate in “both directions” using readily available wireless devices.

Once the US National Wireless Broadband Network is completed, Sanswire will be able to provide voice, video, and broadband Internet access to all parts of the country.

newstip by R. Koenig who says:

I work in the wireless communications industry and I find it hard to take these guys seriously.

I know for a fact that no PCS, Paging WIFI, WIMAX etc would be willing to send equipment 65,000 feet into the air, it’s not practical unless they can design radio equipment that is bullet proof, needs no scheduled maintenance whatsoever and will never become out dated.

I just got done supervising an equipment change out on a roof top by a national PCS carrier because the installed equipment had reached capacity, they simply needed to increase capacity less than a year after initial install.



  1. Bryan says:

    This sounds really cool.

    I hope it comes to my area soon, I would sign up.

    The thing R. Koenig is missing is that anytime the thing needs regular maintenance, you just send a fresh one up. Once it’s in place, turn it on, the old one off. Then land the old one. Rinse and repeat as necessary.

    Keep in mind this isn’t a sattelite. You don’t need to put it on a rocket and blast it in into space. You just float it up 13 miles.

  2. Leonardo says:

    Hey… maybe just in time for War Of The Worlds that debuts June 29..

  3. Lou says:

    Regarding the Koenig comment, he seems to be off base. Plenty of companies are willing to send equipment in the air that has no intended service mechanism, and does become outdated . This equipment is called a “communication satellite” (sarcasm intended).

    To me it sounds like it has lots of potential. It should be orders of magnitude cheaper than space based satelites, more than making up for the need for more units for the same coverage.

    I can’t speak of the economics for cell phone communications, but I would imagine video delivery (echostar/direct-tv/etc) and rural decent speed internet would suffice as killer apps.

  4. Mike Voice says:

    I am leary of the “ad speak”, such as:

    “Made of Space age Materials and powered by solar powered electrical engines, each Stratellite will reach its final altitude by utilizing proprietary lifting gas technology.”

    Space age?? – that was what the 60’s thought the 90’s would be, wasn’t it? 🙂

    Interesting that they list the maximum time aloft as 18-months, with the planned cycle of swapping them for upgrades at that interval. Would there be two for every coverage area – one aloft, the other being upgraded? Or would there only need to be one or two spares in rotation between several coverage areas?

  5. Ray Koenig says:

    I think your missing the point about maintenance, most of the wireless companies have scheduled maintenance of their equipment because radios stop working PA’s burn out pass band filters need periodic tuning antennas stop working and so on. Let’s say you have a tower site that has all of the major PCS carriers, several paging stations a WIFI some UHF carriers and government stations, all of which we have on our sites.
    To “float down” a Stratellite to repair one carrier you would take all of the other carriers off the air as well for the duration of the repair.
    Some other obstacles:
    All PCS installations also have T1 circuits. Unless the call you are making is to anther cell phone on the same network as you that call has to go to ground to complete your call.
    Line of site becomes an issue as currently most WIFI’s use fixed point to point microwave called a backhaul to connect all of their sites to a main site that again must go to ground via a T1 circuit. Line of site between Stratellites would be a nightmare as even the slightest drift would cause the link to fail.
    The list goes on.

  6. Edward Dinovo says:

    John, you’ve been blasting these “balloon” initiatives like SkyLinc for years – have you had a change of heart or do you still think they are a bad idea? If so, what do you think is the best way to bring broadband to those that do not yet have it?

  7. Miguel Lopes says:

    Maintenance-wise it’s easier to work on something like a hge blimp than a satellite – you don’t need a space shuttle and a bunch of highly trained astronauts risking their lives – just bring the thing down, do the required work, send it up again. Should work, at least on paper.

  8. T.C. Moore says:

    I guess they’ll just have to “think outside the box” to solve all the technical problems you mention, Ray. I’m sure the solution will involve proprietary, space age technology.

    If it costs Y dollars to repair that failing device atop a building or hilltop, and it costs 30xY to send up a replacement airship and bring the other one down (so there’s no interruption for any carriers on the airship), then the carriers will have to weigh that extra cost against being out-of-date or having some down time. And if the airship equipment replaces equipment on 50 or more hilltop towers, then it would seem to be a good deal. It’s all about the numbers, man. Including reliability factors, and how many redundant airships you need to get five 9s of uptime.

  9. site admin says:

    Ed, I still think the idea is rum-dum. And why does every have to have broadband? My Mom won;t even use a computer.

  10. Bryan says:

    John said:
    > And why does every[one] have to have broadband?

    It’s not that everyone has to have broadband, it’s that some people need to have broadband everywhere.

  11. Ray says:

    I think the killer app is military applications in certain regions of the world.

    For example UHF satellites. There is a severe shortage of UHF spectrum available. It is a valuable resourse that war fighters want.

    Throw a couple UHF transponders & some VHF-FM retrans and you just probably doubled your C4ISR capability for a thousand miles.

  12. Edward Dinovo says:

    Right, email and most web pages do not require broadband. But with all the Flash/Java ads the experience is far more frustrating on dial-up than ever before. Sometimes I wonder if web designers even consider the bandwidth limitations some users face. I think content providers are going to force as many people as they possible can to broadband so it will be easier to sell them videos, music, and software.


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