Hundreds of satellites by 2015? Better get busy!
What could possibly go wrong? (besides nearly everything...)
“Outernet”. Wow!
Why would anyone do this for free. I’m thinking it’s not going to be free for long.
Color me skeptical. If the service is given away for free then the product they are selling is you - that is, your privacy.
The existing Wifi frequencies are probably designed for their current implementation: distances covered in hundreds of feet, bandwidth for small numbers of local users.
Good luck making existing devices work over distances of many miles, servicing millions of devices.
Wow....all it takes is use of real catchy phrases like "Wide RF technology", UDP, Cubesats (like those research programs funded by DARPA), and on and on and on.
I'm surprised they didn't through in "big data" somewhere there.
Physics is a real "b!tch." Taking a standard cell phone that has at most 10, 20 mW (heck, make it 100 mW) RF power and a likely omnidirectional antenna gain and then jumping to a 'cubesat' with an equally pitiful power budget when it comes to 'wide RF' transmission, along with all the other problems this 'scheme' could take is truly a feat.
Give them your money. They only need 'millions', but they'll take 'billions'.
I do not wish to sleep under an Outernet moon!
How are they going to ensure that devices that can broadcast back to the satellites (for silly things like the desired URL)? I have satellite internet and it requires a parabolic dish with a higher transmission power than my tablet or computer.
Very nice, but you need a suitable receiver. It will not be cheap. Governments can block its import. Plus there’s the problem of latency. 1/4 second. No way to overcome that one.
Maybe they can get the democrats to declare that internet access is an entitlement, and instead of obamaphones they will be giving the “poor” their very own sattelite modems.
5.56mm
The “technically” impossible part is the “free” part
yes, but what if it becomes sentient?
I’m really sure that the North Korean’s or the Chinese are going to allow a wide open “Outernet”Spewing all sorts of western propaganda over their country ‘s .
That go’s for the rest of the dictatorships as well.Including our own little slice of Obama hell.
You can just about guarantee they’ll jam those signals unless it’s to their benefit.
Trying something like this in the ‘90s (for phone service only) was one of the things that killed Motorola. I suspect the economics are much better now, especially since it’s sounds like they’re going for one-way transmission only. That is, they will continuously broadcast network content worldwide and your computer will cache it for whenever you decide read it.
If they broadcast 100 megabits/second, that’s about 4 GB of data that your computer can slurp up every hour, or about 100 GB/day, that you can then sample at your leisure. They could easily update you daily on the 1000 most popular websites, the 1000 most popular YouTube videos, and perhaps even provide a cache for a 1000 new DRM mp3 songs every day, that you could tap into with your credit card.
It wouldn’t be like being live on the Internet. For example, you probably can’t transmit back to it without some land-based service, but you could certainly browse a lot of bits.
The choice of what you get to browse, however, will be theirs. Even transmitting 100 GB per day, they won’t necessarily transmit FreeRepublic or any of your other favorite sites. Then again, they might choose to be an alternative to the liberal ground-based media. It could be revolutionary!
Lets see how many suckers buy this one.
Step 1 in the evil alien plot to enslave humanity.
More and more we are drawing closer to the time when “every eye shall behold Him”
Didn’t I see this in a movie once?...............Skynet...................