High-speed Internet access via stratospheric HALO aircraft

Angel Technologies Corporation and its partners (including Raytheon Systems Company) have committed significant resources to date to pioneering broadband wireless millimeter wavelength (MMW) services from piloted High Altitude Long Operation (HALO) aircraft. Scaled Composites in Mojave, California, a subsidiary of Wyman Gordon, is flight testing the HALO/Proteus "proof of concept" airplane of full scale, and its sister company, Scaled Technology Works in Montrose, Colorado will type certify the airplane through the FAA and will be the series producer of the airplane. Angel and Raytheon demonstrated a symmetric 51.8 Mbps link from a rooftop, tracking antenna to a general aviation airplane in flight at a slant range of about 25 miles, through which the data services highlighted in this paper were delivered. The HALO airplane will be the central node of a wireless broadband communications network with a star topology, the HALO Network, whose initial capacity will be on the scale of 10 Gbps, with a growth potential beyond 100 Gbps. The packet-switched network will be designed to offer bit rates to each subscriber in the multi-megabit per second range. Raytheon and Angel conducted a demonstration of the first commercial wireless broadband link from ground to a moving aircraft, a 50 mile round trip connection of 52 Mbps (OC-l rate). The following services were demonstrated over this wireless link: T1 access, ISDN access, Web browsing, high-resolution videoconferencing, large file transfers, and Ethernet LAN bridging.