Elon Musk, who heads up Space X, is one of several entrepreneurs to ask the Federal Trade Commission for a license to put the Internet in space. Glen Sagers, assistant director of Illinois State’s School of Information Technology, says it may be a bit difficult to get the idea…ahem…off the ground in the U.S.
Sagers:
When it comes to “space Internet,” you’re talking about putting a satellite or something up there that we can bounce a signal off. Right now, the technology is all there, but it’s expensive.
Almost all Internet service we have on the planet is provided by something running underground—wires, fiber optic cables, etc. Even with cell phones, it goes through a cell tower, but the provider has to have a landline to that tower before the signal goes out on radio waves. Internet from space would mostly bypass the landline, going only to a ground station, then up to a satellite, and bounce signals from one satellite to another until it is beamed down to a subscriber. Google is proposing something similar, but with large balloons in the atmosphere.
If these got off the ground—no pun intended—then most of us wouldn’t see a change for a long while. Much of the U.S., Western Europe and parts of Asia are very heavily wired. They already have working infrastructure based on the underground cables. Google is proposing the service for rural areas, where you cannot get broadband, but I don’t think for the average U.S. user it’s going to be cost effective to make a switch. Developing countries, on the other hand, are a completely different matter. The infrastructure isn’t there, so satellite would be the only game in town.
Some people have brought up the idea of satellite being a security risk, but I don’t think it’s any more dangerous than our current situation. Think of a neighborhood—if you have cable service, your whole neighborhood is connected back to one central hub with routers here in town, which connects to ones in Chicago, then to wherever else. If anything, satellite is more secure, because the only way to access it is to have a direct line of sight. That means if you bounce something to that satellite, you would have to be directly in that path to intercept the waves, which are usually encrypted.
Space Internet is a cool idea, with very cool technology, and a good way to get coverage to places that don’t have it. But the idea of it taking over the system we have now? I don’t see it.
