An interesting update on HAPS – which might ring bells if you have your head in the trenches with private 5G, on the horizon with physical AI, or in the clouds with D2D, or you just happen to be looking for the next hair-brained networking fad. Except this could be more than that, if Softbank’s latest pre-commercial tests of high-altitude platform stations (HAPS) with US-based aerospace and material science company Sceye are anything to go by. The Japanese telco, its fingers in just about every innovation seam in every layer of the tech stack, says it has demonstrated common-or-garden smartphone comms from a blimp-style airship 20 kilometers above Japan – including voice calls, text messages, video streams, plus disaster alerts and maritime calls.
More than that, it fixed the platform within a five-kilometer radius of its terrestrial target area, despite stratospheric winds – and put a mobile core and a web server on board the aircraft to boot. As a consequence, Softbank reckons it recorded a round-trip latency of 68 milliseconds for traffic processed through the onboard edge – more than 40 percent lower than equivalent internet traffic routed via the cloud. The trial also linked the HAPS to drones, allowing remote flight control, location tracking, and video transmission. Which is a lot of stuff, right there – and makes HAPS look less like an eccentric alternative to Starlink et al and more like a missing layer in the new network stack, with terrestrial RAN below, LEO satellites above, and edge computing somewhere in the stratosphere. More here…
James Blackman
Executive Editor
RCR Wireless News
RCR Top Stories
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