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Nice if it could work. There are a lot of flaws with this but the biggest flaw is the one about the $30 satellite cellphone. If that had been possible, Iridium would not have gone out of business. They weren't charging $2000 per phone because they wanted to. Globalstar does somewhat better; its phones sell for about $800. In fact, we can't even make and sell digital terrestial cell phones for anything close to $30; the only cell phones which can be made that cheaply are old-style analog phones (such as AMPS). If you figure a round number like $500 per satellite phone, and assume 99 phones out of a hundred are never found or are destroyed by the bad guys, then you're talking about $50,000 per phone which actually gets into sympathetic hands. Most of those people won't know anything; figure one person in a thousand who does and it costs you $50 million dollars per satellite phone which is actually used to phone in a tip. (And one in a thousand is a generous estimate; it's probably more like one in a hundred thousand who knows something and is willing to snitch.) AMPS phones, though, can be made for somewhere near that $30 number. The problem is that AMPS is power-hungry and short range. It cannot be used with satellites; it must have a relatively dense local infrastructure, and most of the nations where this would be useful there is no such system. And even in the nations where such infrastructure exists, it wouldn't be accessible with these air-dropped phones, since it would presumably under the control of hostiles. Their idea for implementing a local cell system by air-dropping solar-powered cells is ridiculous. An AMPS cell requires somewhere near a half a kilowatt absolute minimum, and no reasonable solar cells can generate anything like that amount of power. They would also be absurdly vulnerable to looting or outright destruction. Also, they are not cheap; you're looking at upwards of $50K per cell. (The phones can be made cheaply because the cells are expensive.) Digital requires less power, but both digital phones and digital cells are much more expensive -- perhaps five times as much per phone and three times as much per cell. The idea of mounting cells in planes is perhaps a bit more practical -- the cell equipment could be powered by the plane itself instead of silly solar cells, and it wouldn't be on the ground where it could be destroyed, but it would be fantastically expensive to cover a large area that way, given that current cell technology has at most a reliable range of about 15 miles. One plane would cover an area of about 700 square miles. Afghanistan has a surface area of about 260,000 square miles. Do we really want to keep 500 planes in the air over Afghanistan nearly all the time? That would require a fleet at least twice that large, plus all the infrastructure to support them with fuel and spare parts. Who's going to defend them against anti-aircraft artillery and SAMs? Figure another 500 or so war planes just for that. That would actually make this one of the largest air forces on earth. The US only deployed 1800 combat jets in Desert Storm; we're going to use 1500 planes just to get tips from informants? Our heroes say that this is extremely cheap; they figure the whole thing could be done for $10 million. I figure that between design time for the phones and cell equipment, gearing up for mass manufacturing and deployment of all the planes you'd need, and everything else, you're looking at spending at least a thousand times that just to deploy, and a daily operation cost of $10 million just to pay for all the men and fuel and supplies. And it couldn't go into operation even in a small nation for at least five years; it's going to take you at least year just to design the ASICs before you can begin mass production. This stuff doesn't happen overnight. What we have here is a classic example of "Everything is easy for the man who doesn't have to do it himself." (discuss) |
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