They state:
Fortunately, there is an easy step the United States and its allies could take to help: deploying cellphone base stations on aircraft or tethered balloons. The calls could then be routed to Navy ships equipped with satellite communications terminals.
Base stations are small and cheap. Indeed, this kind of portable system, though not used, was already available in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and in the years since the hurricane, the equipment has shrunk even further.
Ideally, a commercial cellphone operator would provide direct access to its network, and either the operator, the American government or the international community could foot the bill.
What’s more, establishing such a network would present minimal risk to pilots, who could loiter safely over the Mediterranean and still provide coverage to the coast, where the overwhelming majority of Libyans live and where most of the fighting is.
1. The effective radius of a hand held cell phone cell, a mobile phone outside the US, is at best 3 miles. Thus you need cell site centered about 5-6 miles from each other, consider the standard chess board. That is lots of cell sites.
2. Now cell sites need power, lots of power, there is lots of stuff there.
3. Cells need stable antenna, balloons are not generally stable platforms. They pitch, roll and yaw, and unless you find a way to stabilize them, like I did when I worked on Apollo launches using gyros, then you have a real tough antenna problem.
4. Then you need back haul circuits, that is quite complex, and eats up a ton of bandwidth!
5. Then you need replacement etc.
6. We assume no billing and we assume some smart radio so it carries multi band stuff and the like.
7. Then you assume that no one jams the stuff, or say shoots the balloon.
Frankly this idea was proposed a dozen or so years ago and did not get airborne then, in a benign environment. One wonders why this ever got in the Times, but then again it is the Times!
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