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A satellite broadcasting company called Outernet wants to bring all this content many of us take for granted to the estimated 3 billion people without internet access. That catch is that, in order to get content to as many people as possible efficiently and cheaply, Outernet's connection goes only one way.
"We want to solve the information access problem as quickly as possible," Outernet co-founder and CEO Syed Karim says.
Outernet sells a simple gadget called the Lighthouse that can connect to a satellite dish and download—but not upload—information such as Wikipedia entries, public domain texts from Project Gutenberg, news, crop prices and more. The device doubles as a Wi-Fi hub, so that users can connect to it and download or browse text on their own devices. You can also build a Lighthouse-style receiver yourself, using the company's open source software and instructions. The service is free, and anyone with the proper equipment can pick up Outernet's broadcasts.
Yay, a new device to capture the spending power of the 3 billion humans who live on less than $2 per day.
Related: Facebook's Internet.org "Platform" Launches
(Score: 2, Touché) by WizardFusion on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:06AM
So to distract them from their starving, diseased ridden lives, they want to give them the internet and cat pictures.
The money would be better spent on getting food and aid to them instead.
Yes, I know education is important too, and Wikipedia may help with this, but Wikipedia has offline DVDs that can be used instead - much cheaper.
(Score: 3, Touché) by pkrasimirov on Tuesday July 28 2015, @12:06PM
And pr0n. The Internet is for pr0n.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:24PM
And since in so many parts of the developing world pr0n is illegal, even punishable by flogging or worse, it has ironically made people in those places more conversant with proxies and other security/anonymity measures than in the developed world.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @12:45PM
Won't they need some sort of internet enabled device first?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:22PM
I've been following this blog [whiteafrican.com] for years, which covers the tech scene in Africa. There it's all about mobile Internet, because people can't afford computers but a great many people have cell phones. Originally it was about getting news and crop prices and the like via SMS; now as smartphones are spreading it's more robust. But even just the crop prices by SMS has made a big difference in the lives of the farmers in that region because now they can check what prices are before loading everything up in the truck and riding 6 hours on rutted roads to get to market and maybe make a profit.
But it's my knowledge through that blog of what does exist in places like Africa now vs. my skepticism about the company in TFA's business model that make me question if they know what they're doing. It would make more sense to work through the mobile devices that people there already have.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday July 28 2015, @03:46PM
That's great for the developing world "upwardly mobile" class, but there are also a LOT of rural people, especially in Asia and Africa, that don't have access to cellular networks, simply because it's not cost effective to build the infrastructure in the middle of nowhere, when population density * population wealth is so incredibly low. It is spreading rapidly as the cost comes down, but it will probably take many decades before the most remote places become even vaguely appealing to traditional cellular infrastructure.
That's where Satellite-based services start getting appealing though - line-of-sight can easily extend 20-40x the distance as for a cellular tower (400-1500x times the coverage area), with much slower signal falloff. And for a one-way broadcast-to-buffer service such as Outernet that coverage doesn't have to be continuous, so even a single satellite can bring access to what is effectively a modern globe-spanning library. Sure, you've got to make a local "Lighthouse" Library branch to get access, but I suspect those could be mass-produced in extremely cheap, durable, and self-contained forms, as well as being cobbled together from fourth-hand components.
It actually seems to me to be a strategy with great gracefully scaling upgrade potential as well: Being wifi, all those "mobile internet" smart-phones will make dandy interface devices - even the ultra-low-end ones discarded by the developing-world middle class. And I would fully expect the Lighthouse to also double as a local message board, especially as the local link technology incorporates old cellular antennas as the rebroadcast technology instead of WiFi (no new hardware needed for all the people who have already invested in an old smartphone for wifi access). And as densities increase with such antennas, mesh networks become more viable to provide regional intranets*, and eventually tie in to the internet itself.
*I'm assuming that if you've got an old cellular network repeater antenna it's at most a software upgrade away from being able to form a mesh network
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:48PM
If all you can think to do with the vast repository of information that is the internet is look at cat pictures, well then, I feel sorry for you.
If I was starving and disease ridden then information about farming and disease prevention might be useful.
(Score: 2) by penguinoid on Tuesday July 28 2015, @09:14PM
So to distract them from their starving, diseased ridden lives, they want to give them the internet and cat pictures.
The money would be better spent on getting food and aid to them instead.
Yes, I know education is important too, and Wikipedia may help with this, but Wikipedia has offline DVDs that can be used instead - much cheaper.
You're wrong on several counts.
1) Direct material aid is more complicated than you might think at first glance.
2) Very few phones can read DVDs
3) News (especially crop prices) isn't the sort of thing you want on old DVDs.
RIP Slashdot. Killed by greedy bastards.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Wednesday July 29 2015, @05:47AM
you are ignorant.
we already provide them with plenty of aide. the problem is the local governments are corrupt and are taking all the resources. we've even tried dropping food directly to the people but you end up with soldiers coming in and gunning down anyone who touches it. the food is taken and used for their military. the sad fact is we cannot help them with physical goods if their government doesn't want us to.