Google's broadband-in-the-sky goes TITAN-ic

After a couple of years of selective reveals to favoured media, Google has made an uncharacteristic to-all-comers announcement about its broadband plans at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The Chocolate Factory bought drone-maker Titan Aerospace in 2014, and has told the conference its solar-powered drones will be carrying …

[Ru']

If it flies into a sufficient headwind then it could appear to hover over one spot on land I guess.

[Voland's right hand]

20km is above jetstream

20km is above jetstream level. So it cannot hover. It has to go down to 12 km or thereabouts which means that it will enter the altitude range where it is obliged to comply with FAA (and other agencies reqs, have a flight plan and a transponder). So the idea of hover like a kestrel (into wind) is off the menu.

Otherwise, an LTE (or similar tech) network with antennas pointing downwards will work quite nicely at radio level. At higher layers it will get intresting - there are way too many places in the code in the mobiles, provisioning system, switching, etc which were written using the basic premise that a base-station does not move.

[Alan Brown]

s/hover/orbit/

Or more usually, a figure 8 flightpath above XYZ location

If it has sufficient payload and electrical capacity to run 24*7 after taking out battery overheads then I'm impressed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: s/hover/orbit/

And that's a bog standard mission profile whether you are tasking a Combat Air Patrol (CAP) with a human on-board or a drone tasked to orbit some piece of ground.

[Trigonoceps occipitalis]

FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF THE BLEEDIN' OBVIOUS

Google senior veep Sundar Piachi told the conference that drones are easier to control than balloons.