The Outernet project...

[SAWYER]

I dont see this happening

 

[surfsatwerk]

Sounds too Skynetty for my tastes.

 

[smackababy]

How will my tablet be able to send and receive information form space?

And, where are they getting their data from? Are they just going to connect a big satellite to the internet and let people access it from there?

 

[Phoenix86]

How will my tablet be able to send and receive information form space?

And, where are they getting their data from? Are they just going to connect a big satellite to the internet and let people access it from there?

WiFiEx charged usb drive, duh. Just have to send new drives up every now and then.

 

[Albatross]

I think these guys recently launched a fleet of mini satellites but they are not the same team?.

 

[Jeff7]

No censorship, eh?

At least not until the right people ask, bribe, or threaten them.

 

[Kaido]

I dont see this happening

http://i.imgur.com/xGAfBlG.jpg

 

[XavierMace]

How will my tablet be able to send and receive information form space?

And, where are they getting their data from? Are they just going to connect a big satellite to the internet and let people access it from there?

That's what those wavy bars at the top of the phone are for.

 

[smackababy]

That's what those wavy bars at the top of the phone are for.

Are you implying that current tablets have the ability to project signals into space? At best, they can hit antennas set up in strategic points that would then beam the information (from a large satellite) into space. Which requires exactly what this is supposed to avoid: infrastructure set up in places lacking it!

So, either all devices get satellite adapters to connect to their network (which will be incredibly sparse, unless it is connected to the internet or stuff is hosted in datacenters set up by someone) or this is a waste of $12 billion.

 

[DesiPower]

Looks like one of those promises of home automation, or self driving cars promised in the 80s

 

[Newbian]

It all sounds nice until aliens come and use them to surf the web and see nothing but cat pictures then destroy the earth because of it.

 

[_Rick_]

I'm not sure how you can package solar cells, hardened RX/TX hardware into a cubesat that only weighs 1.33 kilograms.

You would need onboard:

A battery, charged at the start to supply enough power to unfold the solar panel, and powerful enough to make sure the thing operates at night (around 40 minutes of its orbit).
solar panels mounted to a deployment mechanism.
cooling to cool the battery and TX hardware
radio antennae - probably deployable (more mechanisms) and dedicated RX/TX
RX amplifier and A/D convertor
Routing firmware on hardened logic board (to transmit/receive properly from other birds in the network)
TX amplifier and D/A convertor
and it'd be really swell to have just a tiny bit of propulsion on board, because we can't afford to put a huge amount of litter into LEO. Manmade Kessler Syndrome, no thanks.

I'm not sure you can pull something useful off with that weight restriction.
Next, you need a frequency band you can soak with your signal. A shared downlink channel may work (may even be necessary) but requires a lot of synchronization between the satellites, which is less than trivial, especially given the speed they're moving at relative to one another and the ground. I'm suspecting that a priori the Doppler effect is going to make a global network not feasible.

Second, RX/TX strength. Who controls the content? In order to make this feasible in any way, you want small RX on the bird, compensated by big ground TX. Due to the relatively low orbit compared to TV birds, which are often up near GEO for economic reasons, TX doesn't need to be as big as a TV bird, or ground RX can be scaled down.

Realistically, can we expect even 100W of TX power, given the size/weight constraints? I very much doubt it. Let's assume they launch 50.000 cubes (if their budget is right, that means they spend about half on launches)
The earth has 510 km² of surface are. Each cube has to cover, in the best case, around 10.000m² of surface. That makes for a signal level of around .01 W/m² (assuming a perfect antenna geometry and a magic constellation), which is meaningless without knowing the transmission frequency, which in turn determines the available bit rate.
A low bitrate broadcast isn't very useful.

So while this may make it back-of-the-envelope workable (the signal strength is almost achievable, and with the right frequency, there won't be a need for too big a ground RX antenna), realistically, there's little gain in wasting money spewing trash into LEO, and face Doppler, when we could use terrestrial signalling which isn't much more expensive, but much less cool, and people would actually have to perform maintenance, instead of just putting more trash into LEO.

 

[dighn]

i wanna know what kind of bandwidth they hope to achieve with this and who is going to foot the (probably vastly underestimated) 12 billion bill.

 

[Jeff7]

i wanna know what kind of bandwidth they hope to achieve with this and who is going to foot the (probably vastly underestimated) 12 billion bill.

Kickstarter showed that we'll pay tens of thousands of dollars for potato salad.


"Facebook and Twitter everywhere. From space. Please donate."

They'll fund it, and then also pay for their new corporate headquarters on the Moon.
The key though will be to hide the running total of pledged dollars until after it's done. Once it reaches a few million dollars, most people will figure that it's almost 100% of the way there, and donations will flatline.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Neat idea, but 100% wireless is just not sustainable, we need fibre.

This is a better start imo:

http://projectmeshnet.org/

Right now most people are using wireless or even the internet itself for backhauls but that could change over time. The trick with a project like this is covering the cost of it though. You don't want it to turn into some capitalist network, then it's just the internet again. Though the nature of being less centralized would probably mean more independant ISPs and less government control. At least till the government makes the whole project illegal.

 

[Printer Bandit]

What's the catch? There is always a catch.

 

[Fenixgoon]

and how exactly do they plan on obtaining all this content?

 

[smackababy]

and how exactly do they plan on obtaining all this content?

They aren't going to be able to use that "we are just rebroadcasting it" defense Aereo tried!

 

[Red Squirrel]

They should build data centres on the moon using robots. Though I guess technically the US owns the moon, so they'd probably be subject to draconian internet laws too. Would be harder to enforce though. Go right ahead and send the FBI on the moon to confiscate my server because there's an MP3 on it. Just keep hosting illegal stuff on the moon till the US runs out of money for FBI astronaut missions.

 

[sdifox]

Ask Motorola how their Iridium network deployment went :awe:

 

[Red Squirrel]

I can see those satellites sometimes.

Can confirm they eventually made it up there.

 

[swanysto]

1. I don't believe that this will avoid censorship completely.

2. A wild west internet service sounds like a complete troll fest to me. The internet is troll-e enough as it is, I can't imagine what it would look like with no rules.

 

[Greenman]

What's the catch? There is always a catch.

The catch is it will end up being an advertising delivery system. Huge investment requires huge return.

 

[CPA]

lol, Who the hell is paying for the $12B to start up this project and who's paying the ongoing maintenance and labor costs. I have my guess who they'll look to (US via the UN), but I find it very interesting they make no point in how they plan on funding the project.

 

[halik]

Ha yes, I love 1200ms latency. $20 says this is some retarded kickstarter project aimed at fleecing reddit morons a la solar roads.