The rebirth of satellite Internet
It's a bird, it's a plane, it's the rebirth of satellite
Internet
The Internet, coming to a sky near you
By Matt Weinberger
Network World | Feb 5, 2015 9:16 AM PT
SpaceX, Facebook, Virgin Galactic and Google have all
announced major initiatives that would help connect the world -- especially
developing nations -- to the Internet. But the next thing in worldwide
connectivity isn't going to be in underground cables, so much as it will be
over your head. It starts with satellites, but it gets a lot weirder.
Back in the nineties, when we first started to understand
the promise of this whole "Internet" thing, satellite Internet access
represented the promise of the future: High speeds, delivered anywhere, without
waiting for your local phone company or cable provider to build out the
infrastructure necessary for broadband access. The reality was less glamorous.
Massive latency issues (a beam has to bounce from space
and back, generally not great for your everyday user experience in the age of
Netflix) and a generally low quality of service, coupled with the demise of
prominent satellite Internet providers in the wake of the dot-com bust, meant
that cable and DSL connections thrived while satellite waited for its time to
come around again.
Indeed, a few years ago, a new breed of satellite
Internet providers started popping up, propelled back to relevancy by advances
in satellite technology. Just for example, Eutelsat put KA-SAT in orbit in
December 2010, providing broadband to most of Europe with 70Gbps distributed
over 80 spot beams. Then when the ViaSat-1 launched in October, 2011, it had
140Gbps of bandwidth, earning it the Guinness record for the world's highest capacity
satellite, more than every other satellite covering North America -- combined.
The FCC clearly agrees that satellite broadband has made
great strides, and started to include satellite Internet services in its annual
broadband reports for the first time ever in 2013. That came with the caveat
that these connections are still not great, but getting better and more
reliable.
There's a ton of room for providers who want to help
people in remote or sparsely-populated areas get online, both at home and
abroad, dovetailing nicely with the Obama administration's stated goal of
getting more Americans online in service of furthering education and
stimulating the economy. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Sir Richard Branson's
Virgin Galactic announced plans to help a venture called OneWeb put up to 2,400
satellites into low-earth orbit, offering broadband access to many thousands in
conjunction with local partners.
Google made a serious investment in Elon Musk's private
space company SpaceX in January, with the money earmarked to go towards a
similar satellite Internet scheme to OneWeb's.
But search giant's high-flying Internet ambitions go beyond satellites,
or at least below them.
Google's Project Loon is a very low-publicity but
ambitious project first announced in 2013 that originally aimed to provide
broadband Internet served from balloon relays floating in the stratosphere that
would link back to a traditional ISP somewhere along the chain. The project
started as a pilot (no pun intended) in rural New Zealand, tested across
licensed radio spectrum in Nevada last April, and had another test of its LTE
deliverance capabilities in Brazil over the summer.
Meanwhile, Facebook is testing solar-powered drones the
size of a commercial airliner that would fly around and act as satellite
relays, transmitting Internet service back to earth. The social network is
hoping that one human operator could fly 100 drones, and that a drone could fly
for five years before needing replacement or repair.
If you're wondering why companies like Google or Facebook
would care so much about helping more people at home and abroad get online,
well, it depends how optimistic you are. Facebook helms Internet.org, a
corporate activism group that campaigns to make broadband more affordable to
the world's population with participation from browser developers, smartphone
manufacturers, and platform holders. And Google is making headlines with its
slow rollout of an affordable Google Fiber crazy-fast ISP. So if you want to
believe these megacorps are after the positive ink and the philanthropy, more
power to you.
But consider also that Google and especially Facebook
have business models that rely heavily on user growth in order to thrive. The
more people in more countries who are connected, the more people in more
countries signing up for Facebook profiles and looking at Google ads. Moreover,
owning the infrastructure would give these companies a lot of leverage when it
came to political or business negotiations.
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