Airship Successfully Delivers Cell Service in Japan - DTNS 5376

Tom Merritt (0:08)

This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, October 19th, 2026 We tell you what you need to know, give you important context, and help each other understand.

Robb Dunewood (0:17)

Today, a new Mexico company proves you can deliver reliable cell service from a helium-filled airship testing it out in Japan.

Tom Merritt (0:24)

I love this story. I'm Tom Merritt.

Robb Dunewood (0:26)

And I'm Robb Dunewood.

Tom Merritt (0:27)

Let's start with what you need to know with that big story.

So the company is called Sky, but they spell it S-C-E-Y-E, because they've got their I in the sky, but maybe the one with the K was already trademarked. I don't know. Anyway, it's called pronounced Sky, but spelled that way. They completed a test flight between August 9th and September 5th of an uncrewed helium airship based Cellular Tower, going from its headquarters in Roswell, New Mexico to Japan and back. Now, this is a full size airship. You could have people on it. They just don't. Some of its systems are autonomous, but they also have supervision so they can help tell it when to pause and keep track of weather.

Whole good stuff on the Ars Technica article about this, about all the processes that go into it. After it arrived over Shikoku, the smallest of the Japanese islands, the four main Japanese islands anyway, it demonstrated LTE connectivity to smartphones, laptops, drones, in cooperation with Softbank. This is the first time the airship provided actual service, not just test service. Softbank actually turned off their cell coverage for a small coverage area.

I'm gonna guess I couldn't find confirmation that they turned off the LTE service. Maybe they had 5G still going or something like that. But the end result was Sky was handling voice calls, text messaging, internet, and it all went great. They had tests that made sure they were getting signals from an open beach, one from a forest, ones from inside a building. Those were the ones they were like, those will probably fail, but they did not. A server on board also tested some edge computing scenarios and demonstrated an average response time of 68 milliseconds. And they also tested using ground based lasers to provide a more directional higher speed link. Obviously, you have to keep the airship in a stationary position for that to work, but that could be used to provide a relay station for satellite based internet. So use the laser to get up to the airship and the airship, which is 60,000 feet up, can then more easily get to the space based satellites. It is propelled by an electric propeller.

It has batteries that charge from solar panels, so it can fly through the night based on its batteries and then start charging back up during the day. It's 83 meters long, it's about 273 feet, and as I just mentioned, can operate at 60,000 feet above the flight path. Usually flight paths are 30,000 or lower, but close to those satellites. SkyShip can carry 100 kilograms, about 220 pounds, and deliver up to 1 kilowatt of power for its devices. That's enough for the test, but future designs, they hope to be able to get to carry up to 250 kilograms. That would allow mobile broadband coverage equivalent to around 550 ground-based towers. Robb, I am very encouraged by this story. I know it's just a test, but it's a very successful test. And it's more than just like, hey, we're floating things out there to see how they work. This could be useful not just in disaster scenarios, but in, again, providing uplinks for satellite Internet and a whole other bunch of other stuff.

Robb Dunewood (3:41)

This is a very, very, very cool test. And I had to read the entire story to understand what this is, because my initial thought was, oh, well, we're kind of already doing that with like the tethered balloons or the tethered, you know, dirgibles they'll put up in a disaster area to just give local coverage right there.

This thing could replace 500 cell towers.

That's a lot of coverage area.

So even though they've talked nothing about the expense of this, if you can cover what 500 towers would do, this probably would be fairly cost, you know, whatever the opposite of prohibitive is. Cost effective, I guess? Cost effective. Is that right? If you could cover 500 towers with just one of these things, even though this thing might be ridiculous, you know, as far as what it costs. So I thought it was pretty cool. And when you think about 60,000 feet, that's a long way up, but it's not space. So it's something that can fly around. You don't need to put it on rockets to get it up. It literally just takes off out of a hanger, gets to its altitude and just kind of sits there. And for the most part, just operates on its own. So it is a really, really cool idea. And I think that you could ultimately bring cell coverage to a lot of places to where it may be difficult to just build towers. They don't have, you know, just don't have the infrastructure to build the towers everywhere. Because if you build a tower, you've got to run power to it. You've got to run lines to it. You've got all kinds of things that come when you're talking about building towers. This would allow you to do some things over fairly large areas. So I'm just geeked out about space flight, geeked out about airplanes and stuff like that, always have been. This is really, really cool.