[andrewwhartion]

Once they deploy these to the places in the world they want to, I wonder how long it's going to take for one to be shot down.

[edit] I suppose though they fly high enough to be out of range of most inexpensive weapons systems.

[ChuckMcM]

It would be pretty high up, although still reachable by fighters.

I doubt people in a friendly country would shoot it down, although I could certainly see Iran having issues of someone flying one along the border providing "free" Internet to people inside their borders. No doubt they would be able to successfully jam it's electronics.

Perhaps more worrisome would be having these things fall out of the sky. Being a long as they are, structural failure by suddenly overloading the wing might turn them into the moral equivalent of the Maple Seed of Doom[1] on their way down. Probably reasonably low risk in rural areas but something to think about if they are taking off from airports in Kansas city for example to fly out over the great plains.

It's that latter bit that makes me even more curious. In the write ups so far, both the 'project loon' and the Aquila videos suggest this very expensive piece of equipment is going to be flying over sparsely populated areas to provide Internet. But with so few customers how do you cover the cost? Simple economics would suggest you'd want to fly it over a really densely populated city, then you would have a huge addressable market rather than over the corn fields of Iowa or the back roads of Oklahoma.

It suggests to me that its easier to spend a million dollars operating a couple of these over a small town than it is to get permission to pull a fiber along the power grid. The latter is more of a policy issue rather than a technology issue though.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4urT74yq6c

[evgen]

If you are operating over a large and crowded area you are going to be facing more competition for customers (from competitors that can use the population density to justify the initial build costs of better infra) and you are also going to be facing more spectrum competition and interference. While flying over the corn fields of Iowa may not seem too useful, each plane could have a relatively large footprint and could also be used to enable a lot of non-urban IoT applications. Sell bulk bandwidth to precision farming equipment shops, mobile applications in the area, and households poorly served by old copper telco infra. Not necessarily huge bucks, but you could probably do it at a cost that would crush competing data providers in that plane's footprint and lock up a nice little revenue stream.