Group plans to beam free Internet across the globe from space

Group plans to beam free Internet across the globe from space

www.rawstory.com

The group, which was founded by 25-year-old Kosta Grammatis, is currently raising money to buy the TerreStar-1, the largest commercial communications satellite ever built. TerreStar, the company that owns the satellite, filed for chapter-11 bankruptcy protection in October 2010, opening the possibility that the satellite may be up for sale.

The group hopes to raise $150,000 to finalize a business plan, investigate the legal and business aspects of submitting a bid for the satellite, and hire engineers to turn the plan into a reality.

(visit the link for the full news article)

This is an interesting development imho, which raises some points and theories I have been discussing in recent times.

Now, I have a sneaking suspicion that this particular endeavor is going to encounter some stiff resistance and may well never make it off the ground due to vested interests blocking it.

BUT---I do wonder, that IF our current informational and cyber-war continues, if something such as this---A group with the funds and the engineering tech, may spawn a whole "other" type of internet, independent of the one which is operating now? By creating a whole new broadcast system, beamed down from a satellite?

One thing for certain, this will certainly carry on into the SPACE war, and attempted shooting down of said broadcast systems, should they arise, me thinks.

Please discuss...

www.rawstory.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

This is/would be amazing, however I fear that shortly after it's debut, if they succeed, there would be a "malfunction" or some other excuse as to why it is not working.

I forsee an accident with an experimental space weapon...

Pretty neat but. "In other news, the U.S.'s new rocket sent to collect space dust unexplainably crashes into the TerreStar-1 satellite" We can only hope though, cool article.


Deebo

So we'd all need satellite uplinks? i'm confused, I should read more of the full article. Right now you can get online via wired, wifi, and cell connection, as well as satellite, but don't you need a carrier plan for satellite and cell internet access?

How to they intend to keep this free if it, gets off the ground, snicker ?

reply to post by DimensionalDetective


The water powered car. Teslas many cost saving electrical insanities, and the power sources that are carbon free, but that have been over priced to prevent timely up take... Corperate interests, the obsession with absorbing money, the obsession with control of provision, with control over assets and movement of fuel goods and data. The ventures which make things cheaper and easier to access always fail . These are the reasons that this venture is pretty much doomed to fail, and the moment it does, you can bet new laws will come in , to prevent private not for profit communications organisations from deploying, owning, or broadcasting an internet provision .
This venture must succeed the first time round if any similar network is to succeed in the future.

reply to post by DimensionalDetective



Great find DD
Let the Chinese or Egypt try to block that!
Heh!

I wonder how fast the connection would be and how they would be able to have enough bandwith for everybody in the world to actually connect to just one sattelite.

Thats a fantastic idea.

It would usher in a new week of freedom. Until the chinese blew it up spectacularly, or the USA crippled it subtly.

I wish i had more hope...

It's always great to hear genius ideas attempted to be put into place. It reminds me of our History books. Let's hope this 25 year old and his satellite don't "fall" out of a "16 story window".

People with dreams such as these, tend to attract unfortunate deaths.

How can they offer it "Free"?

More like every web page you view will have an HTML injection of ads across the top of the page. NO THANKS.

An accident might be a little TOO obvious and too difficult to cover-up if this ``group`` succeeds. I bet this purchase will never be allowed in the first place. The government will continue to force the people to pay the bailout for the telecommunications company and then continue to charge obscene amounts of money for the internet... *sigh*

The OP missed this first sentence, which I think is very important:

The charity group A Human Right said it was planning to purchase a satellite that would provide free basic Internet access to developing countries around the world.

So, not EVERYONE in the world would be getting access to this...

(although there are roughly 5 billion people out of the 6.9 that DO NOT have internet access...)

A Human Right plans to finance their satellite by allowing telecommunication companies to purchase bandwidth, while providing basic service for free to everyone.

And the telecommunication companies are just going to jump on board and say ``Sure, we will pay a bunch of money to you and then just GIVE it away to the people for free...`` Last time I checked, corporations don`t care about the people they care about the bottom dollar.

Wow! What a great idea! Give the world "FREE" Internet! And ...
...
... sniff all their data and stock-pile whatever might be useful for ... "later use".
Require a logon so that you can track everything per registered user.
Which registered user visited what sites.
Which registered user even just did DNS lookups for sites.
What protocol each registered user is running.
Sniff all their e-mail traffic for keywords.
Sniff all their instant messaging for keywords.
Transparent-proxy all their web-browsing to get that data too.
Do man-in-the-middle substitutions to present phony "certs" that appear authentic, that way you can even get "secured" stuff!
... The possibilities are endless!

I'd Be happy to see more competition here in Canada for ISP's, right now it's like an oligarchy, just a few providers.

We need more competition as the cost is way too much. I guess Roger's CEO felt that 13 million a year in pay was not cutting it.

Originally posted by harrytuttle
How can they offer it "Free"?

More like every web page you view will have an HTML injection of ads across the top of the page. NO THANKS.

looks up at the top of the ATS page


As long as they don't yell "you won" or playing bad anime music it's not such a bad trade off...


ETA... will our tinfoil hats work as internet receiver dishes?

reply to post by pianopraze

You're comparing apples to oranges. I chose to come to this site, but I don't want to have to see additional ads EVERYWHERE I go on the internet. #1, it's not fare to the websites that don't receive revenue from those ads, and #2 it creates unfair competition for the ads to the websites you do chose to go to.

Anyways, that's not the point. I don't see how they could possibly pay for the huge expenses through click ads alone. It doesn't add up. Each user would have to click on many many ads a month for them to break even, and most users simply don't click that many ads. ATS doesn't make $50/month from each user, they make maybe a few bucks per user, but because of the shear volume of users, it pays for the site and then some.

But the ISP satellite is a much more expensive operation to run than 1 website, even ATS. It would require every user to put in a lot of money, and ads alone wouldn't subsidize that, and that's a fact.

reply to post by harrytuttle


They will make a fortune. All the lemmings will give them all their personal information, giving them huge info lists to sell... They will of course be able to track all your history and custom design adds just for you... it's just as free as those Grocery store cards. And one day you will try to call for pizza and:

The Iridium network did have some bankruptcy during its days, en.wikipedia.org...

Although the satellites and other assets and technology behind Iridium were estimated to have cost on the order of US$6 billion, the investors bought the firm for about US$25 million

A cheep way to get rid of some debt, sounds like some dodgy stuff is going on somewhere with it. You are going to need a lot more than one satellite to provide Internet coverage to the world. With one you can either give one region constant coverage or move around the world with intermittent coverage. There is also a big bandwidth issue if too many people try and use it which will just jam the system. Also need the equipment on the ground to send and receive. There are lots of issues for anyone trying to get into space and it does get expensive. I wish them well in their endeavours, if they can get some business model working with one satellite it will make it easier to expand to others.