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O3b Launches Four More Satellites To Bring Internet To 'Other 3 Billion'
An anonymous reader writes "O3b Networks is aiming to provide internet access through satellite, to the "other three billion" people in under-served equatorial regions (Africa, the Pacific, South America). O3b launched four more satellites [Thursday], to add to the four they already have in orbit. This is a very international effort; a Russian Soyuz rocket went up from South America, carrying satellites built in France. There's a video of the rocket and payloads coming together and a video of the rocket launch. There's also an academic paper describing using the O3b system from the Cook Islands in the Pacific, giving an idea of what it does and those all-important ping times."
The 150 ms / 300 ms round trip was the "simulated" ping time. They ran real ping tests over 24 hours to the most remote coverage location at the Cook Islands.
One was from Surrey, England to the Cook Islands and averaged 570-800ms round trip -- the other was from California, US to the Cook Islands and averaged 420-620ms round trip. These were performed once per second for 24 hours and can be found in Figure 5 of the research paper.
Maybe the other 3 billion will use a near limitless supply of knowledge for something other than watching cat videos.
These aren't exaclty lucrative potential customers...
Who's paying for this and why?
Cruise ships. Especially in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, and South China Sea. Two years from now, fast and semi-affordable shipboard internet will be a selling point and competitive advantage. Five years from now, it will be something every ship needs just to be taken seriously.
Substitute "books" or a video of "how to get clean water with scrapped parts" for that last word and you'll see what the big deal is.
If you can't get in their shoes think of Hurricane Katrina and how the big deal in the aftermath is the lack of communications that resulted in food rotting when there were plenty of hungry people but the communications to direct the supply efforts were not there.
By investing the money in giving people the ability to talk about how to get rid of local warlords without having to gather in a public place and get hacked to death by machettes - something like this internet thing perhaps?