LONDON, June 25: Huge airships hovering miles above major cities could replace satellites as providers of telephone and Internet services in as little as five years, Britain’s Meteorological Office said on Monday.

The unmanned balloons would sit in the stratosphere — between 12 and 60 km above sea level — keeping their position fixed by making use of solar-powered propellers and the vagaries of the weather in inner space.

“They will essentially be big, solar-powered blimps which hover in the stratosphere miles above our heads,” Mark Higgins, an innovations facilitator at the Met Office, said.

“The benefit for phone companies is that they will cost a fraction of what it takes to send satellites up into space,” he added.

While the telecommunications technology has been tried and tested, the limitations of solar power and a rudimentary understanding of stratospheric weather systems have held back the balloons’ launch.

The Met Office is working closely with two Britons who are attempting to fly a monster helium balloon to the edge of space this summer.—Reuters