It’s four years now since we started hearing of plans to beam down fast internet capabilities from space. We all ignored it largely as a) we were all enjoying decent speeds at home anyway and b) it was all the words of sci-fi and billionaire tech-owning super-villains.
As usual, collectively we probably missed the point. The technology was largely being planned out to bring the internet to areas of the planet that weren’t used to just getting a low ping rate for Call of Duty or ensuring a 4k Netflix movie streamlined perfectly without buffering.
Three companies all those years ago, SpaceX, Google, and Facebook all had their own plans. SpaceX would use almost 5,000 satellites that they would launch and create a global internet WIFI hotspot – like the one at Starbucks but, well, way cooler. Thinking about it, they should have called it STARbucks. There was a deal to be done there. Elon, call me, let’s talk.
Facebook had plans to do something similar with solar-powered drones and Google meanwhile had Project Loon on the go, a series of giant balloons housing electronics that would beam down “the internet” from up in the sky.
Like I said. Super-villains.
Anyway, largely we forgot about all of this stuff. Even Facebook abandoned its drone idea in 2018, but this week, the other two plans(plots?) got off the ground.
