I expect that many Starlink customers in low-income nations will be organizations in which connections are shared.
The introduction of the Internet into a community will have unanticipated side-effects on the community and the individuals in it.
Early Indian VSAT terminal
Beta testers in the US and Canada paid $500 for a terminal and are paying $99 per month for the service. The beta tests began in high-income countries, but SpaceX is beginning to roll Starlink out and will include low-income nations, for example, India.
Last September, SpaceX responded to a request for consultation on a roadmap to promote broadband connectivity and enhanced broadband speed from TRAI, the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of India. In response, SpaceX made several recommendations that would enable them to quickly begin service in India. The talks between SpaceX and TRAI must be going well because, on November 2, Elon Musk tweeted that they would be operating in India "As soon as we get regulatory approval. Hopefully, around the middle of next year".
Musk is famously optimistic, but let's assume they are authorized by TRAI -- will rural Indian consumers be able to afford the price SpaceX is charging in the US? For now, the price of Starlink service will be the same in every nation, but that may change if they find they have excess capacity after more satellites are launched.
Regardless, many Starlink customers in low-income nations will be organizations in which connections are shared rather than individual homes. We already see such examples among the current beta testers. One beta site is the Pikangikum First Nation, a 3,000-person indigenous community in remote Northwestern Ontario, Canada where Starlink is serving community buildings and businesses as well as residences. Other Starlink beta testers are Allen Township, outside of Marysville, Ohio, and the Ector County, Texas, and Wise County, Virginia school districts which are installing Starlink terminals in student homes.
I expect that many Indian installations will be like these -- serving community organizations, clinics, schools, businesses, telecenters, etc. rather than consumers in their homes. Of necessity, low-income nations have a long history of shared Internet resources and India is no exception. My colleagues and I found Internet kiosks and telecenters in India in the early days of the Internet, click here and here, and in other low-income nations. For a richly illustrated global tour of early telecenters and their applications and impact, click here. (Jim Cashel has suggested that SpaceX should focus on schools).
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has quipped that setting up a Starlink connection is as simple as pointing the terminal at the sky and plugging it in and that seems to have been close to true for the Pikangikum community. The Pikangikum installation was spearheaded by FSET Information Technology. FSET delivered the terminals and installed the first 15 then community members took over and installed 45 more.
But what about more difficult installations? A casual perusal of the Starlink discussion on Reddit shows that some users have to build creative mounts to connect in wooded or otherwise obstructed areas. Skill is needed for installations in areas where there is no clear view of the sky or some local networking is used to share satellite terminals.
Again, of necessity, technical improvisation by citizens is common in low-income nations. Think of community "street nets" which may be small like this one in Gaspar, Cuba, or large like SNET in Havana. Building networks like these requires technical skill, tools, and supplies, and there may not be an FSET around to help. SpaceX and other constellation operators will need to support rural communities by providing online and in-person training and a marketplace for tools and supplies. The Sun Microsystems Netday initiative for installing local area networks in schools provides an early, successful example of this sort of vendor support of community networking.
Of course installing terminals is just the tip of the iceberg. A community or organization network must be financed and users trained. Again, the constellation operator should play a supporting role. Note that the Musk Foundation has just made a "significant" contribution to Giga in furtherance of their goal of connecting every school to the Internet. I don't know anything about the terms of the grant -- whether it is cash or subsidy -- but since terminals are expensive and SpaceX is selling them at a loss, perhaps the schools will receive free service. That would cost SpaceX essentially nothing as long as the school was at a location with unused capacity and it could be phased out over time -- something like the National Science Foundation phasing out university connections in the early days of the Internet.
Since Teledesic in the 1990s, prospective constellation operators have promised that Internet connectivity would improve the health, education, and economy of unserved regions and entertain the residents as well, but we are no longer naive and have learned that there may be negative social and personal side effects. For example, in 2011 only 1% of individuals in Myanmar were Internet users. Myanmar privatized mobile connectivity in 2013 and the first international link was activated in March 2014. In June 2014 Aljazeera was asking whether Facebook was amplifying hate speech against the Rohinga.
On a lighter note, I'd hate to see all the Pikangikum teenagers hooked on video games. The introduction of the Internet will have unanticipated side-effects on the community and the individuals in it. It's an opportunity for a 21st-century Margaret Mead to live among the Pikangikum and other communities to observe the changes.
Update 2/17/2021
I used India as an example in this post, but SpaceX is active in several other low-income nations. They have either opened an affiliate office, applied for or received authorization to offer service, or begun negotiations in the following nations:
South Africa, Nigeria, The Philippines, Chile, Columbia, and Mexico. A Teslarati article also mentions Brazil and the Caribbean. One of their affiliate offices, SpaceX Netherlands B.V., has subsidiaries in several European nations, and that may be the case with the Caribbean office that Teslarati mentions. It is a long shot, but I hope one of the Caribbean nations Starlink is talking to is Cuba. (More on that in another post).
Update 2/18/2021
National and local governments, non-governmental organizations, foundations, etc. will also subsidize broadband service from SpaceX and other LEO satellite providers. For example, SpaceX has tentatively been granted $885 million to subsidize rural connectivity in the US and Telesat has been awarded C$85 million for rural connectivity in Canada. One can envision arrangements in which a government or foundation pays for the purchase and installation of equipment and the satellite operator provides free or discounted service. As mentioned above, this would cost the service provider nothing as long as they had excess capacity in the region being served.
I've been studying and working on the Internet in developing nations since 1991 when only a few nations had any sort of Internet connection, as shown in Larry Landweber's 1991 connectivity map:
Every nation is connected today, but the digital divide remains as deep as it was in 1991. Both Facebook and Google are working to bring the 3-4 billion people who do not have Internet connectivity online and they described their efforts at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Google
Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Android, Chrome and Apps at Google Inc., updated the audience on two projects -- Project Loon and Project Link.
Project Loon seeks to deploy a constellation of balloons at an altitude of around 20 kilometers -- above the mountains, air traffic and weather.
The balloons will be airborne routers able to communicate with end users, each other and Internet back-haul locations.
Pinchai said the balloons now average more than six months in the air and keep nearby smartphones operating at 4G or LTE speeds, around 10 megabits per second. “We are well on our way to a platform that, by the end of the decade, will touch 4 to 5 billion people.”
He also gave a progress report on Project Link in Kampala, Uganda where they have installed over 800km of fiber, creating an urban backbone.
As is often the case with municipal networks (as in Stockholm), Google is not a retail Internet service provider, but provides wholesale connectivity to retailers. Pichai said they would be expanding Project Link -- installing fiber backbones "many more" African cities this year.
For more on the Kampala deployment and a thoughtful analysis of the reason for its success, see this post by Steve Song.
Facebook
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke about Internet.org, which hopes to make basic internet services affordable, so everyone with a phone can join the knowledge economy.
While Google is working on long range projects (including an investment in Elon Musk's SpaceX project to provide Internet service using low-earth orbit satellites), Internet.org is already up and running in Ghana, Columia, Kenya, Tanzania, Indonesia and India.
Facebook and their Internet.org partners are focusing on improving traditional terrestrial cell phone technology by improving mobile infrastructure, mass producing cheap, powerful cell phones and caching and compressing data. Their partners reflect this orientation – phone manufacturers, Opera, a Web software company, and Mediatek, a fabless semiconductor company.
Facebook also has a Connectivity Lab lab working on more exotic, long-range solutions.
Short videos on Project Loon and Internet.org
Project Loon:
Internet.org:
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Update 4/10/2015
Mark Zuckerberg spoke at a business conference being held in conjunction with the Summit of the Americas in Panama City yesterday. He announced that Internet.org would be available in Panama and stated that eventually expanding into Cuba “definitely fits within our mission.” (Recall that Internet.org provides “basic Internet services" -- access to leading Web sites -- not access to the open Internet).
(See the related post on cost savings from re-use of rockets used in launching satellites).
In the early 1990s, cellular pioneer Craig McCaw, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal founded Teledesic, with the intention of providing global Internet connectivity using low-earth orbit satellites. The satellite and launch technology were not good enough and the company failed.
Teledesic animation showing a satellite
constellation that would cover the planet.
But satellite and launch technology have come a long way since that time. In an earlier post, I asked whether Google could connect the "other three billion" in developing nations and rural areas. The post surveyed Google projects involving high altitude platforms like blimps, drones or balloons that hover or circulate in the stratosphere, low-earth orbit satellites used for imaging and telephony and medium-earth orbit satellites used for communications and navigation.
One of those projects was a collaboration with O3b (other three billion), a company founded by ex-Google executive Greg Wyler. O3b began with four satellites in 8,000-kilometer equatorial orbits and planned to serve all parts of the Earth within 45 degrees of the Equator. Wyler has left O3b when he went to Google and O3b and now has 12 satellites in orbit.
In describing the O3b project, I wondered "whether they are considering a low-earth orbit constellation" and it seems they were. Mr. Wyler subsequently left O3b to found WorldVu, which planned a constellation of 300 satellites at between 800 and 950 kilometers in altitude and has acquired Ku-band spectrum. Service will be marketed under the OneWeb brand.
That takes care of the improved satellite technology, but how about launch technology?
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article saying that Mr. Wyler would be teaming up with Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX to provide global Internet access using a constellation of 700 satellites, each weighing less than 250 pounds. Musk confirmed the plan in a couple of Twitter posts, but also criticized the Wall Street Journal reporting.
I hope they will be able to realize Teledesic's 1990 vision using 2020 technology.
I concluded my earlier post on this topic by "wondering whether Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin, Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, and Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic are eyeing those other three billion people." I still wonder about Bezos and Branson.
Update 11/13/2014
After writing this post, I attended a session at Rand Corporation's Politics Aside conference and had a chance to ask Simonetta Di Pippo, the Director of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, about her take on this proposal. She did not give a direct answer, but said that Elon Musk is a very smart man and he has never failed to succeed at anything he committed to do.
A SpaceX executive overheard my question and said he could not comment, but he reiterated Elon Musk's tweeted statement that the Wall Street Journal article had errors and we would have to wait a couple of months for the full announcement of their plans.
I guess we will have to wait to see, but this could be a Big Deal.
Two Plane Labs satellites just after launch from the ISS
The satellites shown being launched are Planet Labs earth-imaging satellites. They are smaller and orbit at lower altitude than those discussed above, but might a constellation of more, smaller satellites in lower orbits and carrying routers rather than cameras be suitable for Internet communication? (That is not a rhetorical question -- I do not know).
Whoever builds the rockets, satellites and markets the service, it sounds like Teledesic is being reborn using modern technology and, if successful, it would be a major extension of the nervous system of the Earth and a significant enabler of Bill Gates' work in developing nations.
Greg Wyler wants to bring the Internet to the entire world.
Update 1/17/2015
Elon Musk announced that he plans to deploy a constellation of router equipped-satellites -- evidently in competition with the Greg Wyler's OneWeb project. Musk announced his plan at a closed meeting for potential employees of his new satellite office and state, local and federal government officials.
This effort is not an end in itself, but part of a larger plan to reach Mars -- Musk says he wants to die on Mars.
It is terrific to see two powerful groups competing to fulfill Bill Gates' original vision of global satellite connectivity -- Teledesic. Teledesic failed, but with modern launch capability, micro-satellites and communication equipment one or both of these efforts may very well succeed. If they do, it will be an historic achievement and a significant complement to Gates' current work in developing nations.
Elon Musk will compete with OneWeb
Update 1/19/2015
When this thread began last November, it seemed like Elon Musk and Greg Wyler would collaborate on an Internet satellite venture, but now it looks more like competition.
A post on Ars Technica quotes Musk as saying “Greg and I have a fundamental disagreement about the architecture -- we want a satellite that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than what Greg wants. I think there should be two competing systems.”
They quote Richard Branson as saying that Musk doesn't have a chance because Wyler has spectrum rights and there is not enough space for two satellite constellations. He thinks the logical thing for Musk to do is work together rather than separately.
I can't wait to see where all this ends up in, say, five years.
Update 1/20/2015
SpaceX has confirmed an investment of $1 billion from Google and Fidelity for a reported 10% of the company. That leads to an evaluation of around $10 billion. (I may be old-fashioned, but I don't understand markets that evaluate WhatsApp at nearly double the value of SpaceX).
It also seems that SpaceX is considering the use of modulated laser beams to cope with OneWeb's advantage in spectrum holdings.
Regardless of the technology, OneWeb and SpaceX will have to deal with regulators in each nation they serve, which seems inefficient -- would it make more sense to establish some international regulatory rules?
Looking forward -- what if one of these companies pulls their plans off and ends up serving a billion or two billion customers -- should we worry about their power? It sounds like Comcast on steroids. Even if they both succeed and establish a duopoly, they will have immense power.
Update 1/26/2015
Business Week has published a background piece on Greg Wyler -- his biography and personality. It is interesting to read for general background, but has a few details that are new to me. He says he plans to orbit 648 satellites at an altitude of 750 miles and hopes to sell the user terminals for around $200. Since there will be several satellites within range of any point on Earth, he says their antennas will not need to be professionally installed or move to track satellites, as is the case with O3B.
The article is accompanied by a 4:33 video in which Wyler describes O3B and his plans for OneWeb -- here are a couple of stills from the video:
Wyler with a mock-up of a user terminal
Wyler illustrates the latency differences between
low, middle and geostationary orbits
Update 1/26/2015
Cell-phone video (25:53 min) of Elon Musk's talk at the closed-door announcement of the establishment of a satellite design office in Seattle. Many high-level details on the project.
Update 2/12/2015
Third time is closer, but still no cigar :-(. "Rocket soft landed in the ocean within 10m of target & nicely vertical! High probability of good droneship landing in non-stormy weather." — Elon Musk February 11, 2015
VIA SATELLITE: With industry verticals being served, and O3b connecting the other 3 billion people, where does OneWeb fit in to the communications landscape?
Wyler: O3b Networks does links around 150 Mbps and up, and this is about links that are much lower speeds than that. Our primary core competency will be sub 50 Mbps to small, inexpensive terminals.
VIA SATELLITE: How difficult was it to get investors like Virgin and QualComm to buy into this vision?
Wyler: Qualcomm knows more about communications chips, handover protocols and LTE then any other company. They also have a long background in satellite having built Globalstar and many other satellite communications systems. Virgin has Richard as the leader with a strong understanding of things that you can’t imagine he would have a sense of, and then this deep bench of players.
VIA SATELLITE: I understand an RFP is already out regarding the manufacturer of these satellites? When do you hope to finalize this?
Wyler: We are building satellites at high volume. They need to be done on a production line, rather than a one-off manufacturing process. We are going into a partnership where we will own a portion of the factory and the manufacturer the other portion.
VIA SATELLITE: Is 2017 a realistic timeframe to launch the first satellites? Wyler: I am an optimist. I think 2017 is a realistic time to have our test satellites up. I am not saying the constellation will be working then.
Update 3/18/2015
A third would-be satellite ISP, Leosat, has revealed plans for a constellation of Internet satellites. They will not be marketing to individual end users, but will target government and business -- maritime applications, oil and gas exploration and productions, telecom back-haul and trunking, enterprise VSAT, etc. They (and the others) hope to be able to provide low latency links over long distances. As shown here, a route from Los Angeles to southern Chile requires only 5 satellite hops as opposed to 14 terrestrial hops.
Update 10/7/2016
We have followed SpaceX's efforts to cut satellite launch cost by soft-landing and reusing rockets. Another way to cut launch costs is to use a single launch to place multiple satellites in different orbits and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has successfully launched eight satellites into two different orbits. If rocket reuse and multiple-orbit launches become routine, the cost of creating constellations of Internet service satellites will be significantly reduced.
Single launch places eight satellites
in two different orbits.(credit: ISRO)
Update 11/17/2016
SpaceX has submitted a 102-page technical supplement to their application for permission to launch a constellation of Internet-service satellites.
SpaceX eventually plans to launch 4,000 communications satellites, which would be dozens of times larger than any other constellation, with the first phase of this possibly going online as early as 2018. SpaceX anticipates that the satellite business will become more profitable than the rocket business by 2020, generating tens of billions of dollars by the mid-2020s.
Another post on the same leak was more specific, saying that "SpaceX expects to generate more than $15 billion in profit by 2025."
Update 1/18/2017
Two of the updates to this post were triggered by SpaceX filing a request to launch 4,400 Internet service satellites last November and a leak of SpaceX financial data last week. Each of those events triggered in-depth, informative discussions on Reddit. The Reddit discussion of the request to launch the satellites (here) and the Reddit discussion of SpaceX finance (here) cover launch, radio and IP technology, markets, advantages and disadvantages compared to terrestrial networks and much more. Check them out and join the discussions.
Update 3/11/2017
A 2016 patent by Mark Krebs, then at Google, now at SpaceX, has several interesting figures like this one specifying two constellations, each at a different altitude. As shown here, the lower-altitude satellites have smaller footprints, but would have lower latency times than the higher altitude satellites.
The higher-orbit satellites will be launched in the first phase of the project, enabling SpaceX to bring the Internet to underserved and rural areas of the Earth. The second phase, lower-orbit satellites, will be able to offer faster service and possible compete with terrestrial networks in urban areas. I am not sure, but being at different altitudes might also simplify multi-satellite launches -- launch half at low altitude then proceded to the higher altitude and launch the second half. The high altitude satellites might also enable fewer hops on long, over-the horizon routes (as shown above) and make for smoother satellite handoffs during a session. The following is a neat video explainer of the SpaceX plan:
This acquisition is ostensibly a data play, not a connectivity play, but couldn't a constellation of low-earth orbit Skyboxes cover the globe? Teledesic 2?
Now, Google has acquired Skybox Imaging for $500 million. Skybox uses very small satellites orbiting at an altitude of 600 kilometers, which means they move at over seven kilometers per second relative to the surface of the Earth. Their technology is sufficiently advanced to compensate for that speed and produce videos that clearly show the movement of vehicles -- check this video:
Off hand, this seems more like a data gathering move than part of a developing nation and rural connectivity strategy -- they can use these images to look at traffic (for self-driving cars?), count ships in a port or cars in parking lots, etc. For examples, check this video:
But, they plan to launch many of these low-earth orbit satellites -- couldn't they be used for global connectivity as well? Several companies were formed to do just that in the 1990s. Bill Gates, Paul Allen and a Saudi prince backed the best-known one, Teledesic, but the technology of the time was not up to the task and the company failed.
Shifting emphasis, you can see an earlier video of the Skybox entreprenurial team presenting their vision at the Stanford Busiiness School here.
While this effort is not directly tied to providing connectivity, it beefs up Google's space technology and skills. Google is becoming a player in the space game along with Internet entrepreneurs Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin, Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, and Richard Brnason's Virgin Galactic. There are rumors that Google is negotiating a stake in Virgin Galactic and one can't help thinking Musk and Bezos are watching all this with interest.
One of our grand challenges is to bring Internet connectivity to rural areas and developing nations and Google may be working toward that goal. They are experimenting with terrestrial and extra-terrestrial wireless technology. I will look at terrestrial wireless in a subsequent post -- this one focuses on extra-terrestrial technologies.
During the last couple decades, NGOs, governments and entrepreneurs have worked with four extra-terrestrial connectivity technologies:
(See pictures at the end of this post)
Let's look at Google's projects in this context.
High altitude platforms (HAPs) are blimps, drones or balloons that hover or circulate in the stratosphere. They have cloudless access to solar energy and being above the weather helps with control, but their signals must travel through rain and clouds. They are the lowest flying technology, so packet latency is relatively small, but so is their "footprint" -- the area their signal covers on the ground.
The most visible HAP Internet effort has been that of Sanswire, which has run well-publicized tests for over a decade. Sanswire has gone through bankruptcy, announced projects in Latin America that never materialized and faced complaints by suppliers and employees, but they are still working on Internet connectivity.
Most satellites -- like the Space Station and sensing satellites -- are in low Earth orbit (LEO). LEO satellites move relative to the ground, which means that either communication windows are intermittent or many satellites -- a "constellation" -- are needed to cover the planet.
The first LEO Internet project I know of was used for intermittent connectivity in Africa during the early 1990s. Shortly thereafter, a number of entrepreneurial LEO projects were announced. The most ambitious was Teledesic, which proposed Internet connectivity for the entire planet using a constellation of 288 satellites orbiting at 700 kilometers. Teledesic had high-profile backers like Bill Gates, Paul Allen and a Saudi prince, but the technology of the day was not up to the task and the company failed.
Today, the best-known LEO communication system is Iridium's satellite phone service, consisting of 66 LEO satellites. (Iridium was conceived by motorola as an Internet project, but was scaled back to telephony, went bankrupt and reemerged as a phone service).
This week, Google acquired Skybox Imaging, a company that has put a LEO satellite in a 600 kilometer orbit. The company was formed for data gathering, for example for providing real time video and images of traffic on roads, the sea and in the air, environmental monitoring, or map and earth imaging.
As we see in the following heat-map video from Skybox, satellite imaging proliferated rapidly between 1986 and 2012:
This sort of imagery has both economic and military value so it will provide Google both revenue and expertise in the short run. Might they be planning to parlay that into a constellation of Skybox communication satellites -- Teledesic II with modern technology -- in the long run?
Medium Earth orbit (MEO) satellites are used for communication and navigation. Google recently announced a project with O3b Networks (other three billion). O3b currently has four satellites in 8,000 kilometer equatorial orbits and they plan to launch four more this year. They say those eight satellites will enable them to offer continuous service to all parts of the Earth within 45 degrees of the Equator.
The project with Google is headed by two O3b executives and they speak of spending billions dollars and putting at least 180 satellites in orbit. When they speak of 180 satellites, one wonders whether they are considering a LEO constellation.
(Update: Google's project with O3b Networks has ended, but O3b's MEO technology could still be deployed in Cuba and elsewhere).
Today's commercial satellite Internet connectivity is provided by geostationary satellites, which are positioned above the equator and remain stationary with respect to the surface of the earth since they orbit exactly once per day. Their orbit altitude enables multi-country footprints, but latency and launch costs are high.
Geostationary satellites have been used in rural areas and developing nations since the early days of the Internet, and the industry has remained viable as a result of technical progress in launch technology (public and private), antennas, solar power, radios and other electronics, as well as tuning of TCP/IP protocols to account for the 1/4 second latency due to the orbital altitude. (I've had surprisingly natural voice over IP conversations with people on geostationary satellite connections).
Have those technologies progressed to the point where HAPs and lower orbit satellites are now viable as well?
Since the beginning years of the Internet, NGOs, government agencies and entrepreneurs has been working on the Grand Challenge of connecting developing nations. They have not succeeded, but Google, with improved technology, deep pockets, a long-range viewpoint and economic motivation (ads) may be able to pull it off.
Finally, I cannot end this post without wondering whether Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin, Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, and Richard Brnason, founder of Virgin Galactic are eyeing those other three billion people.
A proposal for a low-earth-orbit satellite constellation like that attempted by Teledesic is being re-considered using modern launch and satellite technology. Entrepreneurs Elon Musk (launch technology) and Greg Wyler (satellite technology) are working on a constellation of 700 low-earth orbit satellites to provide Internet connectivity to rural areas and developing nations and Google has several related projects. Will they realize Teledesic's 1990 vision using 2020 technology?
In an earlier post, I proposed the use of conventional geostationary satellites in Cuba. If this effort by Musk and Tyler were to succeed, and the Cuban government would allow it, this would provide an even better interim connectivity solution. (Modern fiber infrastructure would remain as the ultimate goal, but satellites would provide an affordable interim step.)
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Update 1/27/2014
Well, the die is cast. Google has elected to back Elon Musk's satellite Internet project in competition with Greg Wyler. It's great to see two major teams competing to be ISPs to the Earth. If one or both succeed, the upside for humanity is clear, but is there a downside? It is a bit frightening to think of a global ISP with, say, a billion customers. What sort of regulation or oversight would be needed?
Elon Musk is announcing the opening of the SpaceX satellite engineering and development office in Seattle (video)
Teledesic animation showing a satellite
constellation that would cover the planet.
There has been significant technical progress in connectivity
to geostationary satellites since this picture was taken in India.
Figure from Arthur C. Clarke's article proposing
geostationary satellites for world wide radio coverage
Geostationary satellites have large footprints.
Titan Aerospace solar-poweed drone
O3b MEOs will cover the middle of the planet/
Does anyone know anything about this Google blimp? (Photoshopped?)
Our balloons today are doing pretty much everything a complete system needs to do. We're in discussions with telcos around the world, and we're going to fly over places like Indonesia for real service testing this year.
Astro Teller, head of Google X, gave a Ted Talk on the unexpected benefit of rewarding failure. Google X works on "moonshot" projects. They start with a radical idea then immediately begin trying to prove it is impossible by attacking what appears to be its weakest spot. If the weak spot cannot be overcome, they kill the project and reward the participants.
In this talk, Teller described several projects that had failed and some that had not yet failed. Project Loon, Google's balloon-based Internet access experiment has not failed so far. In fact, it has made significant progress.
Teller gave a status report on Project Loon, which is still very much alive, starting at 8 min 22 sec of the following full talk:
The transcript of his Project Loon report follows, but you should check out the video for the images.
8:22
Probably the craziest sounding project we have is Project Loon. We're trying to make balloon-powered Internet. A network of balloons in the stratosphere that beam an internet connection down to rural and remote areas of the world. This could bring online as many as four billion more people, who today have little or no internet connection.
8:46
But you can't just take a cell tower, strap it to a balloon and stick it in the sky. The winds are too strong, it would be blown away. And the balloons are too high up to tie it to the ground.
8:59
Here comes the crazy moment. What if, instead, we let the balloons drift and we taught them how to sail the winds to go where the needed to go? It turns out the stratosphere has winds that are going in quite different speeds and directions in thin strata. So we hoped that using smart algorithms and wind data from around the world, we could maneuver the balloons a bit, getting them to go up and down just a tiny bit in the stratosphere to grab those winds going in those different directions and speeds. The idea is to have enough balloons so as one balloon floats out of your area, there's another balloon ready to float into place, handing off the internet connection, just like your phone hands off between cell towers as you drive down the freeway.
9:52
We get how crazy that vision sounds -- there's the name of the project to remind us of that. So since 2012, the Loon team has prioritized the work that seems the most difficult and so the most likely to kill their project.
10:12
The first thing that they did was try to get a Wi-Fi connection from a balloon in the stratosphere down to an antenna on the ground. It worked. And I promise you there were bets that it wasn't going to. So we kept going.
10:27
Could we get the balloon to talk directly to handsets, so that we didn't need the antenna as an intermediary receiver? Yeah.
10:37
Could we get the balloon bandwidth high enough so it was a real Internet connection? So that people could have something more than just SMS? The early tests weren't even a megabit per second, but now we can do up to 15 megabits per second. Enough to watch a TED Talk.
10:58
Could we get the balloons to talk to each other through the sky so that we could reach our signal deeper into rural areas? Check.
11:08
Could we get balloons the size of a house to stay up for more than 100 days, while costing less than five percent of what traditional, long-life balloons have cost to make? Yes. In the end. But I promise you, you name it, we had to try it to get there. We made round, silvery balloons. We made giant pillow-shaped balloons. We made balloons the size of a blue whale. We busted a lot of balloons.
11:46
(Laughter)
11:48
Since one of the things that was most likely to kill the Loon project was whether we could guide the balloons through the sky, one of our most important experiments was putting a balloon inside a balloon.
12:01
So there are two compartments here, one with air and then one with helium. The balloon pumps air in to make itself heavier, or lets air out to make it lighter. And these weight changes allow it to rise or fall, and that simple movement of the balloon is its steering mechanism. It floats up or down, hoping to grab winds going in the speed and direction that it wants.
12:26
But is that good enough for it to navigate through the world? Barely at first, but better all the time.
12:35
This particular balloon, our latest balloon, can navigate a two-mile vertical stretch of sky and can sail itself to within 500 meters of where it wants to go from 20,000 kilometers away.
12:55
We have lots more to do in terms of fine-tuning the system and reducing costs. But last year, a balloon built inexpensively went around the world 19 times over 187 days. So we're going to keep going.
13:14
(Applause)
13:20
Our balloons today are doing pretty much everything a complete system needs to do. We're in discussions with telcos around the world, and we're going to fly over places like Indonesia for real service testing this year.
The article describes an enormous challenge with 80-hour weeks and frayed tempers, the risks they took, the secrecy around the project and a fascinating behind the scenes look at the preparation for the risky on-stage demo Steve Jobs did at the product introduction (starting at 21m 3s -- watch at least through 24m 30s):
Here are a few quotes from the New York Times article to pique your interest:
It’s hard to overstate the gamble Jobs took when he decided to unveil the iPhone back in January 2007. Not only was he introducing a new kind of phone — something Apple had never made before — he was doing so with a prototype that barely worked.
Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued — it happened, but mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, ‘You are [expletive] up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be because of you.’
But every time Jobs and his executives examined the idea in detail, it seemed like a suicide mission. Phone chips and bandwidth were too slow for anyone to want to surf the Internet and download music or video over a cellphone connection.
Above all, Jobs didn’t want to partner with any of the wireless carriers.
Apple designed and built not one but three different early versions of the iPhone in 2005 and 2006.
No one had ever put a multitouch screen in a mainstream consumer product before
Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s top hardware executive at the time, says there were even long discussions about how big the phone would be.
The iPhone project was so complex that it occasionally threatened to derail the entire corporation. Many top engineers in the company were being sucked into the project, forcing slowdowns in the timetables of other work.
Big companies like Marvell, which made the Wi-Fi radio chip, and CSR, which provided the Bluetooth radio chip, hadn’t been told they were going to be in a new phone. They thought they were going to be in a new iPod. “We actually had fake schematics and fake industrial designs,” the engineer says.
Even people within the project itself couldn’t talk to one another.
Can peer-peer support compensate for disadvantages?
Corey Davis, director of online learning at Our Lady of the Lake University, was interviewed recently on the Chronicle of Higher Education's Tech Therapy podcast. Davis says the discussion of MOOCs and other online courses often fails to consider minority (poor) students and the obstacles they face.
Davis addresses two general issues -- lack of access to technology and poor preparation in terms of both technical proficiency and conception of education.
He has addressed the technology access problem by developing an online course for Latino oil workers, who only have access to mobile phones, not computers with broadband connections. Presumably those workers also have poor computer/Internet skills and do not have an academically-oriented background.
The problems he addresses are very real, and his effort valuable, but there are a couple of problems with the mobile, low tech approach.
Let's imagine the same course, developed twice -- once for delivery on a broadband-connected computer and once for delivery on a 4G cell phone. Which will be the most frustrating and confusing? Taking the course using the computer will be simpler, faster and less frustrating than using the phone. If we restrict this to a 3G phone, the gap will be wider and if we restrict it to a 2G phone (most common among poor people world wide) it will be impossible to deliver the same course.
The people Davis wishes to support need and deserve the broadband/computer version.
The second problem has to do with attitudes toward and expectations about education. Someone raised in a family that values education and has learned to learn effectively has an advantage regardless of technology access or skill.
One solution to this problem would be monitoring and mentoring students who are doing poorly, but that is expensive and does not scale to MOOC proportions. Might a course on how to take a course help?
Explicit support of student peer groups might also be helpful -- formally tying the success of each group member to the performance of the group as a whole. The efficacy of peer tutoring is well documented. (This is reminiscent of both executive bonuses on Wall Street and the five-member groups of Bangladeshi village women who receive Grameen micro-loans -- quite a range).
I don't have a lot of solutions, but, as Davis says, these are important problems. If they are not addressed, online education may be part of the inequality problem, not part of the solution.
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Update 5/29/2013
I just finished this post saying we would be short-changing poor students if we only gave them material on cell phones, but, I do a lot of work in developing nations and there are things we can do now -- even with 2G phones.
Last week, I spent a couple of days in Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar. Here are some quick impressions of the state of the Internet there.
I stopped at two Internet cafes to check email and upload my student's final grades. The computers were old tower PCs with small LCD displays, and they were running Windows 7. The cost was only 50 cents (US) per hour, but the connections were slow -- around 100 kbps as measured by Speedtest.net. At that speed, I was able to read my email, but our campus grade reporting system was unusable.
As in many developing nations, pirated software is sold openly in Myanmar. The labels on the binders shown below indicate the categories of software for sale in a store I visited. (You can see the "production department" against the wall behind the table).
Disks were also displayed on racks in the store. "Installers" -- disks with programs -- cost $US 1.25 and content disks cost just over 50 cents. The selection was quite random and many of the programs were old versions. Windows 7 was available, but not Windows 8.
One of the newest looking shops I saw had computers customers used to make online purchases. This service makes sense in a nation where few people have Internet access and payment and delivery systems are not available.
Finally, I saw a shop selling used consumer electronics and computers. They also had a smattering of electronic parts -- it reminded me a little of the computer and component swap meets back in the early computer hobby days when we were wire-wrapping our own boards and of the auto junk yards where I hung out as a kid.
Myanmar has a population of 48.3 million people and a GDP per capita of $US 1,300, making it the second poorest nation in Asia after Nepal (GDP per capita of $US 1,200). Given this level of poverty, it is not surprising that the Internet has not taken off. The following statistics are comparable to those in a developing nation 15 years ago:
Internet related statistics, Myanmar 2011
Percentage of individuals using the Internet
1.0
Fixed (wired) broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants
0.1
Active mobile broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants
0
Fixed telephone subscriptions per 100 inhabitants
1.1
Mobile-cellular subscriptions per 100 inhabitants
2.6
International Internet bandwidth Kbit/s per Internet user
As we see, a very small percent of the population uses the Internet and there is no mobile access. Organization use, as measured by .mm domain names and secure Internet servers, is practically non-existent. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) ranks Myanmar 131st out of 155 nations using its comprehensive ICT Development Index. (The only Asian nation below Myanmar is Nepal, which is ranked 137th). These statistics explain why my connectivity at Internet cafes in the largest city in the nation was so slow.
That is the bad news. The good news is that Myanmar is rich in natural resources and seems to be emerging from a repressive, capricious and corrupt military dictatorship that dates back to 1962. In 2011, they released Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest and held elections for a minority portion of the Parliament seats. Aung San Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy, won 43 of 45 seats available in the election, and general elections will hopefully be held by 2014. In recognition of these changes, both Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama have visited Myanmar.
Let's hope this apparent progress is for real and the Internet and the nation develop rapidly.
Russell Southwood of Balancing Act, who has been tracking and encouraging the growth of the Internet in Africa since the 1990s, reports that Africa’s future data architecture is beginning to fall into place. In recent years, several undersea cables have gone online, linking Africa to the rest of the world, and now Africans are beginning to deploy Internet exchange points.
Undersea cable that are online or soon will be
In the very early days of the Internet, virtually all international traffic was routed through the National Science Foundation backbone in the United States. An email from the University of Chile in Santiago to Catholic University in Santiago, was routed to Florida then back to Santiago. The US National Science Foundation gave free service and even offered connectivity subsidies to foreign research and education networks. (There was no commercial traffic -- it was all for research and education).
As usage expanded, ISPs in Europe, Asia and South America cut costs by creating domestic Internet exchange points. Traffic remained local -- it was no longer routed through the United States.
As you see on this map of Internet exchange points, Africa is now starting down that path. An interactive version of the map is online at the University of Oregon Network Startup Resources Center which has been tracking and encouraging the spread of the Internet in developing nations since the late 1980s.
Internet exchange points in Africa
Southwood points out that Africa still has a long way to go, stating that "on a recent visit to a Central African country, I discovered that an mbps of international bandwidth still costs over US$1,500 compared to the low hundreds or lower in more competitive countries." (And that is still around 10 times the cost in developed nations).
African connectivity trains the rest of the world, but is improving
Indeed, Africa lags far behind other continents in Internet connectivity and utilization, and the relative gap continues to grow, but the absolute level of service is improving. That will benefit Africa and the rest of the world as well.
