Thanks for hanging in there.

We're on the home stretch.

This is the last half a day.

Thanks for coming.

Thanks for sticking around.

I hope you enjoy what we have going this afternoon.

As I usually lead off in these presentations, I say hi, my name is Thomas Olson.

I am in the satellite communications business.

However, my satellite does not orbit the Earth.

And while it is not geosynchronous, it is certainly geostationary.

And that is my introduction to the world of high altitude platforms, if you've never heard

of them before.

Most of you in this room know what they are.

And we are in fact building one.

One thing I want to make very clear, if this thing will work, one thing I want to make

very clear.

Technically, Ave Alto, which stands for high bird in Spanish, we are not an airship building

company.

We were forced by circumstances to come up with a design and actually build one for ourselves

because we're a telecommunications company, which is a pretty straightforward business

model.

And what we want to do is provide wireless internet and mobile backhaul services to unserved

and underserved areas in the world, of which about there are 3.2 billion people that are

not basically connected to much of anything.

And so our idea is to build a high altitude platform that can provide services that are

actually affordable and sustainable in those parts of the world.

We're not the only ones working on this, but we've come pretty far and next to nothing.

So I just want to share a little bit what we've been doing and how we've been doing

with it, and we'll go from there.

This is a tech whose time has finally come.

We realized eight to ten years ago that finally all the pieces were in place to create something

that could actually function at high altitude and actually provide service.

We have better materials.

The materials that we use now are much, much better than they were just a few short years

ago.

Battery technology has improved tremendously.

Of course, the flexible solar vortex cells are pretty incredible, a lot more efficient

than they used to be.

And the communication electronics have improved a lot.

So we can pack.

We're basically using the same kind of transponders you might see in a satellite.

They're KUKAC band, X band.

We can pack a lot of them into a small space because they don't have to be hardened to

go into orbit.

Transponders for satellite communications that go into orbit, they have to be specially

hardened, which adds a lot of weight because they have to survive the first 30 minutes

of their life when they're launching out of the atmosphere.

We don't have that problem, so we can pack a lot more stuff into a lot less space and

a lot less weight, and we can provide a lot of service much lower to the ground that way.

And one of the ways we did this, we've built a lot of things over the last few years, and