A friend (Larry P.) once suggested to me that he thought you could build a rural mobile phone much cheaper than Iridium network by putting nodes in all the airliners flying over the country. The airliners have power, and have line of sight to ground stations, and to a circle of about 200 miles radius around them. That’s pretty big (125,000 square miles) and in fact most locations will be within sight of an airliner most of the time. Indeed, the airlines already would like to have high speed data links to their planes to sell to the passengers, and relaying to people on the ground makes sense. It would not be a 100% on network, but that’s OK for many users. Phones would be able to warn about outages with plenty of advance notice to handle conversations, and indeed based on live computerized data from the air traffic control system, phones could even display a list of the times they would be connected.

I was thinking more about this in the context of InMarSat, which provides satellite services to ships and planes in the deep ocean. It uses geosynchronous satellites and auto-aiming dishes, but is quite expensive. Few people launch satellites to have footprints over the ocean.

Airliners fly so often these days, spaced often just 40 miles apart along the oceanic routes. It should be possible with modern technology to produce a mesh network that transmits data from plane to plane using line of sight. Two planes should in theory be able to get line of sight at 30,000 feet if they are up to 400 nautical miles apart. The planes could provide data and voice service for passengers at a reasonable price, and also could relay for ships at sea and even remote locations.

One can also use lower bands that can go further, since there is no spectrum competition over the the open ocean, but I suspect planes don’t spend too much time more than 400 miles from any other airliner (or 200 miles from any land station.) In the high bands many megabits of data bandwidth are available, and in theory spectrum allocation is not an issue when out of sight of land, so even hundreds of megabits would be possible. (We would of course not transmit on any band actually in use out there, and could even make a cognitive radio system which detects other users and avoids those bands.) An airline could offer just this service, or at a higher price switch to satellite in the few dead zones — which again, it should be able to predict with some accuracy. Aiming should be easy, since the aircraft all transmit their GPS coordinates regularly on transponder frequencies and can also do so in the data network. In fact, you would be able to know where a new mesh partner will be approaching, and where to point, before you could ever detect it with an omnidirectional antenna. And people could be given enough bandwidth for real internet, including voice. (Though that still means they should perhaps go to a phone lounge to have long conversations.)

Of course, I often find transoceanic flights one of the rare times I get work done without the distraction of the internet, so this could also be a terrible idea.

Some technical notes: Jim Thompson points out that doppler effects make this particularly challenging, which is an issue. I believe that since we know the exact vector of ourselves and the other aircraft, and we have many more bands at our disposal, this should be a tractable problem.

FTL is one of the exceptions to the laws of physics that RDM has allowed in the show. However, for colonials we only see the FTL jump. When they want to send messages via FTL, they have to send them in a ship that jumps. The Cylons have a better jump technology, but can they also send signals via FTL without using a ship? Examination either they can do this, or they have always had ships just outside of range of the fleet, just about everywhere it has gone.  read more »

I’ve written before about the problems with TV advertising. Recently I’ve been thinking more about the efficiency of various methods of advertising — to the target, not to the advertiser. Almost all studies of advertising concern how effectively advertising turns into leads or sales, but rarely are the interests of the target of the ad considered directly.

I think that has to change, because we’re getting more tools to avoid advertising and getting more resistant. I refuse to watch TV with ads, because at $1.20 per hour of advertising watched, it’s a horrible bargain. I would rather pay if I could, and do indeed buy the DVDs in many cases, but mostly my MythTV skips the ads for me. The more able I am to do this, the more my desires as a target must be addressed.

Advertising isn’t totally valueless to the target. In fact, Google feels one big reason for their success is that they deliver ads you might actually care to look at. There are other forms of advertising with the same mantra out there, and they tend to do well, such as movie trailers and Superbowl ads.

Consider a video ad lasting 30 seconds, with a $10 CPM. That means the advertiser pays one cent per viewer of the ad. The viewer spends 30 seconds. On the other hand, a box with 3 or 4 Google ads, as you might see on this page, is typically scanned in well under a second. These ads also earn (as a group) about a $10 CPM though they are paid per click. Google doesn’t publish numbers, but let’s assume a $10 CPM and a 1% click-through on the box. It’s actually higher than this.

In the 30 seconds a TV ad takes, I can peruse perhaps 50 boxes, bars or banners of web ads. That will expose me to over 100 product offers that in theory match my interests, compared to 1 for the video ad. The video ad will of course be far more convincing as it is getting so much attention, but in terms of worthwhile products offered to me per second, it’s terrible.

It isn’t quite this simple though, since I will click on one ad every every minute spent looking at ads (not every minute on the web) and perhaps spend another minute looking in detail at what the ad had to offer. That particular, very well targeted site, gains the wealth of attention the video ad demands, but far more efficiently.

I think this area is worth of more study in the industry, and I think it’s a less understood reason why Google is getting rich, and old media are running scared. In the future, people will tolerate advertising less and less unless it is clearer to them what value they are getting for it. Simply being able to get free programming is not the value we’re looking for, or if it is, we want a better deal — more programming in exchange for our valuable attention. But we want more than that better deal. We want to be advertised to efficiently, in a way that considers our needs and value. The companies that get that will win, the dinosaurs will find themselves in the movie “The Sixth Sense” — dead people, who don’t know they’re dead.