Experiments Bring Internet to Remote African Villages

nytimes.com

9 points·mqt··4 comments

How wasteful. There are already almost a hundred satellite internet providers that cover Africa, and the monthly charges are less than $100 a month for a reasonable connection that can be shared across 10 computers.

This system has been used in Africa for at least 4 years, which is when I first saw it, together with WLAN distribution nodes using directional antennae.

How does google manage to spend $700 a month on this?

Furthermore, even if you hook up the satellite dish to a solar panel, what powers the computers then? And why do you need to import 3 foreigners for a task that has been done locally for years already?

It looks like O3b (funded by Google, HSBC, and John Malone) is actually building a new satellite Internet infrastructure. They're launching satellites into Middle Earth Orbit instead of Geostationary Earth Orbit to cut the latency in half. The maximum download speed will apparently be 10Gbps. I think the idea is that they'll use this infrastructure as a backbone for ISPs in remote regions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O3b_Networks,_Ltd.

http://gigaom.com/2008/09/09/google-invests-in-satellite-bas...

The wikipedia link does not work. Cutting the latency in half is not saying a lot, because satellite connections have huge latency on the upstream. Any concrete data on what the latency will look like?

The URL isn't parsed correctly. Add a period to the end of the link or search for "O3b" on Wikipedia.

We don't know what the latency will be until they launch but, theoretically, since they're launching the satellites into Middle Earth Orbit, the signal only has to travel half as far as the current satellites up in Geostationary Orbit. Google is also offering Google Apps and perhaps the caching servers we've heard in recent news to the local ISPs.

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