But that’s not to say dreams of mega-speed Web downloads are over. Challenging Proteus for sheer audacity is the Stratellite, a giant airship that uses solar powered engines to sit at about 65,000ft, beaming data over a radius of about 77,700 square kilometres — think blimp meets mobile phone tower.

The Stratellite, which has been developed by a company called Sanswire, is 74.6m long, 44.2m high, and contains nearly 37 million litres of gas. Made of Kevlar, the dirigible is powered by electric motors and held in a position determined by six GPS units. In addition to Internet data, it can be fitted for mobile phone transmission, paging, fixed wireless telephony and high definition TV broadcasts. The downside is that the Stratellite can only sustain 18 months in the air without repairs.

It’s also cumbersome, but the blimp’s advantage over satellites is that it sits much lower to the ground, so it theoretically doesn’t suffer from the same data lag problems.

said by vic102482 :

Latency and satellite will always be a problem, you are talking 26,000 miles round trip.

said by DarkGryphon7 :

Tachyon burst transmitters! Or quantum waveform fold generators. Either one should do the trick.

said by furlonium :

DirecTV's gonna piss off a lotta people. They pull crap like this, probably knowing that most of their customers can't get any other broadband options, like DSL/Cable.

said by furlonium :

or a Flux Capacitor

said by Queasy :

There are a lot of things I'd like DTV to do. Freeing up these satellites for more HDTV is a start. I believe they are launching two more satellites early next year and are planning on having 1500+ HD channels available.

I'd also like for them to turn on the USB ports on the DirecTivos and enable the HMO option. I've upgraded my main DirecTivo receiver in my living room to record 160 hours but would like to share the content with the DirecTivo receiver in the bedroom.

However, since DirecTV and Tivo seem to be on the way out when their contract ends, that may be wishful thinking.