Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

Setting their sights high

What do you do when the market for your services reaches saturation?

There are really only two options:

You can come up with new services that appeal to your existing user-base in a way that doesn't cannibalise your existing revenue streams...

Or you find a way to increase the reach of your services -- extending them to new markets that were previously inaccessible.

The first option can be very hard to follow since most folk only have a fixed amount of money to spend on discretionary activities so any new service will almost certainly have an impact on the revenues of existing ones.

The second option therefore, is obviously the most attractive and potentially, the most lucrative.

So now that virtually the entire Western world (and most of the East) have ubiquitous internet connectivity -- where do the likes of Google and Facebook go to get the new users essential to maintaining strong revenues?

Well how about the developing world -- third-world countries who have been relatively untouched by the power of the internet to date?

The big problem is one of connectivity. Just how do you make the Net accessible to what are often huge areas of the planet with relatively low population densities?

Satellite is the obvious answer -- but due to the huge distances involved when talking and listening to a geosynchronous satellite, the cost to those impoverished third-world users will almost certainly be far to high to be practical.

This is why Google came up with its ambitious plan to create networks of balloons that would deliver Net connectivity to such regions. Indeed, trials of this system were carried out right here in New Zealand last year.

Balloons seem like a fairly good idea -- except that they only have a limited operational life (about 100 days); the tiny molecules of H2 or He slowly leaking through the mesh of polymers that make up the plastic envelope.

Now Facebook have decided to try an alternative technology to deliver the Net to these regions: drones!

According to this story running in the Telegraph, Facebook is in the process of buying Titan Aerospace, a company which plans to build huge solar-powered drones that can operate for five years without a break.

The drones are designed to fly well above cloud and other air traffic at an altitude of some 20Km above the earth. To provide the area of coverage desired, some 11,000 of these craft would have to be launched.

Unfortunately... Titan's proposed drones are still largely "pie in the sky" at this stage with little more than a few demo flights of "technology demonstrator" craft having been undertaken.

When you combine the technical difficulties in producing a craft with a 5-year continuous flight-time and add them to the fiasco that is the regulatory void which presently surrounds the entire UAV industry and I strongly doubt we'll see anything of substance come from this proposed purchase on the part of Facebook.

It's amazing what super-rich companies can do when they've got time (and money) on their hands.

Pssst Mark... if you *really* want to get into this solar-powered orbiting UAV stuff for much less than it'll cost you to buy Titan Aerospace, take a look at this: 2C Solar Drone made in NZ.

Please visit the sponsor!

(Sorry, forums are stuffed at present)

PERMALINK to this column

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font