Bridging connectivity gaps and expanding network accessibility through strategic technological innovations

The increasing dependence of modern societies on high-speed telecommunication and the high costs needed to provide the necessary infrastructure have made knowledge more concentrated within facilities or a small number of intermediation service providers. These places are becoming more attractive for this reason and, even in the post-industrial society, activities and people prefer to stay here. As a consequence, many problems derive from the high concentration of people and infrastructures in the same places, and the lack of accessibility makes these places less relatively preferred.

In the last ten years, many attempts have been made in the direction of increasing the accessibility of fixed infrastructures. More recently, many trials have also been carried out with satellites. In particular, High Altitude Platforms appear to be very effective in supporting high-density traffic, especially for television and interconnection among gross territory fixed infrastructures in the so-called "backbone" segments. But ambitious satellite systems with near-global coverage continue to suffer many problems: long time to obtain permissions for launching a satellite due to a lot of admittance from many different countries, the high costs needed to build infrastructures, and the time to put them into operation. With the key issue of distributing a huge information traffic among many users in many separate sites quickly and effectively, only satellite systems (and in a restricted way HAP and airships) can represent the enabling technology in the telecommunication arena.