Sci/Tech Company plans to beam free Wi-fi to every person on Earth from space

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You might think you have to pay through the nose at the moment to access the Internet.

But one ambitious organisation called the Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF) is planning to turn the age of online computing on its head by giving free web access to every person on Earth.

Known as Outernet, MDIF plans to launch hundreds of satellites into orbit by 2015.

And they say the project could provide unrestricted Internet access to countries where their web access is censored, including China and North Korea.

Using something known as datacasting technology, which involves sending data over wide radio waves, the New York-based company says they'll be able to broadcast the Internet around the world.

www.dailymail.co.uk

New York company says it can beam OUTERNET to every person on Earth

An ambitious project known as Outernet is aiming to provide free Internet to everyone across the world from space in 2015.
www.dailymail.co.uk www.dailymail.co.uk
 
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It will probably be something along the lines of giving people basic internet and allowing them to upgrade it for increased speed.
 
Wonderful. Many sites are blocked in China, and I would love to be able to access them! Love these kinds of companies that don't have tunnel vision for profit.
 
Wummi said:
Wonderful. Many sites are blocked in China, and I would love to be able to access them! Love these kinds of companies that don't have tunnel vision for profit.
Click to expand...

How would you know if they have?
In the end it turns out they record all of your online activity (and passwords and everything) and sell it as big data to the data mining companies.
 
Cool idea! Internet for everyone!
But there will still be loopholes, And they will still get "their money one way or another!"
 
Wummi said:
Wonderful. Many sites are blocked in China, and I would love to be able to access them! Love these kinds of companies that don't have tunnel vision for profit.
Click to expand...

Tor doesn't work to bypas that? or another kind of proxy or whatever (like anonymouse.org as an example)?
 
Darkrider said:
Tor doesn't work to bypas that? or another kind of proxy or whatever (like anonymouse.org as an example)?
Click to expand...

not by itself, the end tunnel where the traffic leaves the tor network and goes to your computer isn't hidden anymore - you could encrypt the data, but that would require the other end to also support the encryption, and the metadata would still be un-encrypted- although I suppose if you were running a tor server as well, that traffic would be harder to detect, as all that would potentially be noticed is an unequal amount of traffic

a proxy server may work, but at best it's secure up to the proxy - the proxy itself and any traffic beyond it would be subject to any surveillance, and unless you somehow got the proxy without using a credit card, and used a proxy that has no monitoring/logs/etc. (bitcoin perhaps), it would probably only make things worse by giving a perception of security

also, http://anonymouse.org/ isn't secure - it isn't using https, so even if you do use it, all it does is hide who you are from the server you visit - not from anyone looking at your traffic, like your ISP - they would still have 100% access to ALL your traffic
 
Slapshot136 said:
although I suppose if you were running a tor server as well, that traffic would be harder to detect, as all that would potentially be noticed is an unequal amount of traffic
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I was thinking about this too. Tor has an option to use it where internet access is restricted but I haven't checked that in a while so I don't remember exactly how it worked
 
I should probably just repeat my comments on Reddit...

Apparently they have never heard of bandwidth. They cannot possibly service 7 billion people with hundreds of satellites. Let's say each of these satellites is capable of 1 Gpbs of speed, and there are 900 satellites.

(900 Gbps) / 7 billion =
17.256565 bytes per second
that means that if we have 1/1000 of the world using it, we'll get about one third of dial-up speed.
Let's go download some HD movies!
 
It's impractical for real everyday use to start with, certainly - but knowledge gained from doing it alone should help future innovation.

Of course working out how to actually make it work when people will certainly be trying to download HD movies or w/e might sink it anyway
 
Conor said:
It's impractical for real everyday use to start with, certainly - but knowledge gained from doing it alone should help future innovation.

Of course working out how to actually make it work when people will certainly be trying to download HD movies or w/e might sink it anyway
Click to expand...


I honestly don't see the point. The knowledge gained would be that of combining two already complicated fields: computer networks (of which we most certainly have existing solutions that handle huge amounts of traffic -- see Google) and satellites. The satellites would not be able to compete with today's real-world networking hardware.

It's doomed to fail.
 
Darthfett said:
I should probably just repeat my comments on Reddit...

Apparently they have never heard of bandwidth. They cannot possibly service 7 billion people with hundreds of satellites. Let's say each of these satellites is capable of 1 Gpbs of speed, and there are 900 satellites.

(900 Gbps) / 7 billion =
17.256565 bytes per second
that means that if we have 1/1000 of the world using it, we'll get about one third of dial-up speed.
Let's go download some HD movies!
Click to expand...

Key word: Free. Plus you're not taking into consideration important variables. For one, seven billion people does not mean seven billion people capable of even having the capacity to access it. Children make up a third or so, which brings us down to like 5.5 billion. I mean obviously they can get on the Internet, but it's unlikely they actually have a device themselves but use their parents so that creates significant reductions in the bandwidth issue. Plus people who don't have access to modern computers are extremely high. If we go by the number of households in the world, then we come to around 1.5 or 2 billion or so. Which is still probably way fucking overambitious.
 
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