Infrastructure innovations enabling rural connectivity

Altaeros, a start-up based in Boston, was co-founded in 2010 by CEO/CTO Ben Glass, an MIT-trained aerospace engineer who came up with the idea during graduate school. Their product, the SuperTower, provides wireless coverage through antennas and radios deployed on tethered blimps, known as aerostats, allowing carriers to provide coverage in places where a deployment was not physically or financially feasible. The project started, as many do, with angel investors and in November 2014 Altaeros secured its first major funding from SoftBank.

The Future Network: Please introduce yourself and your company.

Altaeros is working to solve the challenge of expanding connectivity to the billions of unserved and underserved people around the world, in a way that is flexible, quick to deploy, and most importantly, cost effective for both carriers and their subscribers. We originally came out of MIT in 2010, where I was finishing a graduate degree in Aerospace Engineering and my co-founder was finishing at the Sloan School, but it has been over the last two to two-and-a-half years that we have really been focused on the rural connectivity challenge.

Coming from the relatively small world of aerospace entrepreneurship, and without a background in telecom or infrastructure, we were free to take a pretty innovative approach to the problem of rural networks. The team has developed the world’s only autonomous, full-scale aerostat platform—an aerostat is essentially a tethered blimp, similar to what you see above sports stadiums, which is more cost-effective than building a tall tower to get radios and antennas to heights above 100m. We call our solution the SuperTower, because it essentially functions like a tower, except we mount the antennas and radios to the aerostat which lifts them 250 meters above ground where they have excellent line-of-sight. At this height, the SuperTower can cover up to 10,000 square kilometers, and will typically replace between 20-30 ground-based macro towers.

Consolidating so many towers into a single site is the key to making rural infrastructure much less expensive. That 20-30X multiplier lets us offer lower overall tower lease costs, but it also reduces the cost of running backhaul to so many sites, and eliminates a lot of the redundant or under utilised equipment from rural networks, which lowers upfront and ongoing costs, and cuts down energy consumption by up to 50%.

It is our goal to make rural networks easier and less expensive to build and operate, allowing carriers to profitably expand their rural services. Once we reach this cost threshold, we’ll have unlocked an enormous growth opportunity for the carriers and it will be in their best interest to quickly bridge the digital divide in rural markets. That would be the ultimate win-win-win.

The Future Network: Are your antennas amplifying existing cellular signal from the ground - presumably you can’t put a standalone or a macrocell up in a blimp?

The SuperTower can carry a pretty significant amount of payload, at least an order of magnitude greater than most other telecom balloon concepts, such as Google Loon. We also have power cables and optical fibers within the tethers (in addition to strength fibers, which keeps the aerostat stationary and moored to the ground station), which allows us to transmit power and data from the ground to the balloon and back. With this setup, the SuperTower functions much like a regular tower. We typically have a baseband unit on the ground, and the remote radio heads aloft. However, because we cover such a large area, we generally prefer to have more radios than a typical macrocell, to provide greater capacity.

The Future Network: Is your focus very much on the rural market rather than the urban environment? 

We see the SuperTower as more of a rural solution, because its key advantage is that it can cover a very large area at drastically lower cost, which is well suited to the rural network challenge with lower population densities. Some customers have contemplated putting SuperTowers around the perimeter of a city to quickly build out a new LTE network, then densify with small cells as the demand grows. In most markets, though, the main challenge for urban areas is increasing capacity, rather than providing a base level of coverage, which is why we’re primarily focused on rural areas.

The Future Network: Is the SuperTower pitched as a temporary solution or a permanent one?

Our first generation SuperTower product is intended to be a permanent solution, with a lifetime of up to 20 years, though it is much easier to take down and relocate than a typical steel tower which opens up some more temporary applications. Down the road, we’re planning on building a smaller version of the SuperTower that will be easily towed behind a light-duty truck and will deploy in a matter of hours for disaster recovery or special events. We hope to have the mobile SuperTower system ready as soon as possible, we’ve seen how much of a difference it could have made in some of the recent natural disasters here in the Americas.

The Future Network: Who are you working with currently? Are there any deployments to speak of to date?

We’re currently testing a SuperTower prototype at our rural US test site, using Ericsson LTE radios. We’re planning the first commercial trials next year, but haven’t yet announced our partners for the trials yet. You’ll have to stay tuned for that announcement!

The Future Network: Do you have a particular geographical focus?

We’re planning initial deployments in the US, but really have a global focus. There are so many markets around the world where we can hopefully help connect under- and un-served populations. Beyond the US, we’re definitely exploring India, S.E. Asia, LATAM and Africa.

The Future Network: There are very high barriers to entry in the telecom infrastructure space - what advice would you give another start-up company looking to break through?

Because the big carriers can be wary of new technologies and solutions, it is really important to find an initial niche, or an initial customer who is innovative and excited to demonstrate new solutions. Once you have shown your solution working in the field, it will be easier to get the next set of customers onboard, and expand from there. Of course, all that is predicated on your solution working technically and economically, so the most important thing is getting that right.

The Future Network: What have been the main challenges that you’ve had to overcome in terms of getting projects off the ground (no pun intended...) do you have to deal with municipalities for permitting for example?

While the SuperTower does require local permitting as well as FAA, FCC and other federal permits, we are very fortunate that the regulators have been quite supportive and helpful in ensuring a smooth, efficient permitting process for the safe operation of the SuperTower, especially in rural areas. From a local community perspective, aerostats make no noise and are visually unobtrusive, making them easier to site.

The Future Network: What are your next steps or benchmarks?

We’re really excited to launch our first commercial trials next year with a few select carriers who are enthusiastic to show how we can partner to solve the rural network challenge.

The Future Network: How do you see the future of cellular networks evolving?

The demand for data is going to continue to increase, which will continue to drive densification in urban areas, but as new services like IOT, autonomous vehicles and drones become commonplace, modern data-based networks will also need to expand geographically. This trend, along with the carrier’s desire to increase their customer base and the goal of providing more equitable distribution of digital opportunities, will drive improvement in services in rural markets. I think the network of the future will combine the best of coverage solutions like the SuperTower with focused capacity solutions using small cells where capacity needs are highest. Together, this will provide a seamless, high quality user experience for all customers.