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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) 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