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The Plan to Beam the Web to 3 Billion Unconnected Humans

posted by takyon on Tuesday July 28 2015, @10:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the wait-until-they-find-out-some-search-results-are-advertisements dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

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

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:27AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:27AM (#215167)

    Outernet beams a set of files throughout the day (think wikipedia, PDFs, news, weather, etc). Satellite dish/receiver stations cache this data and make it available locally via WiFi for free.

    Why would anyone want this? When you're too far from the grid (or your grid is down), a solar powered Raspberry Pi connected to a USB satellite receiver/dish that is sharing its content cache via WiFi is next best thing. Runs on sunlight, is inexpensive, reliable, informative, and timely. Bonus: weakens state censorship/snooping.

    It's not an alternative for people with 1gbps internet connections. It's for those with no access at all. And geeks, of course.

    https://outernet.is/en/ [outernet.is]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outernet [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @07:23AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @07:23AM (#215306)

    Bonus: weakens state censorship/snooping.

    Ah, no: it makes it stronger. This is basically a form of digital broadcasting, which means that whoever is controlling it controls what goes into the stream, being censored at the head end. This is tailor-made for censorship, as is ALL broadcasting. If not, why would we need to go online to find out what's really going on with TPP, Snowden, etc?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:19PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:19PM (#215434)

      Think of it like a shortwave radio broadcaster. Yes, the broadcaster's mother could be censoring his content. But whatever he does broadcast travels the world. Anyone can listen to the broadcast, even if it contains content that their local regime (or mother) does not approve of.

      One of Outernet's stated goals (from wikipedia) is "to provide information without censorship for educational and emergency purposes".