Thoughts On A New Space Internet

Recently there have been rumblings about a new internet being built in low earth orbit. Specifically there are two projects being built by Elon Musk and Greg Wyler that hope to accomplish this feat. If these projects come to fruition, around the end of the decade we could be getting our internet from a constellation of a few hundred satellites. This entails lots of benefits, raises some concerns and brings up a few questions. Here are my thoughts.

The Internet Won’t Be A Series of Tubes

As widely mocked as Senator Ted Stevens was for calling the internet a series of tubes, he really did have a point. Fiber-optic cables are what connects all the servers in the world together, and I suppose you could consider them very small tubes in a sense. Anyway, with the new space internet, this analogy just doesn’t work at all, and no one will ever understand this meme.

Lower Latency

The internet as we experience it today is a bit laggy. A simple request to load a web page from your computer has to pass through up to thousands of miles of wires and be processed by a myriad of intermediate servers, just to get to the halfway point of the website’s server. Then the response from the website has to travel back through the same series of steps (and tubes), but in reverse, in order for you to see the web page.

With the space internet, your signal needs to travel up 750 miles to a satellite, possibly travel through space to another satellite, and then back down to the website’s server. Do the same in reverse and you have your web page loaded. This cuts down the number of steps by a lot, and coupled with the much faster time of traveling in space (it is a vacuum afterall) vs traveling over cables, and latency is sure to improve.

Ubiquitous

Life without the internet seems like the distant past to me, but for the majority of the world, this is life today. Less than half of the world currently has internet access, and if we are to reach 100% coverage, we need to connect 4.4 Billion more people. If we just wait around for cables to be laid and servers to be built this would take a long time. But once the space internet satellites are launched, anyone around the world will be able to connect to it immediately. Hopefully this will allow the internetless population to leapfrog the need to spend lots of money over many years running cables under the seas, through the streets, and to billions of homes.

Cheaper By Design

The current “legacy” internet infrastructure is expensive to build and upgrade. This primarily has to do with running cables.

Having said that, right now the cost of satellites, and the cost to launch and maintain them are pretty high. However unlike running cables, I expect this cost to fall dramatically. This is for three reasons.

First, satellites scale exponentially while running cables scale linearly. That is to say, once you have enough satellites to cover the earth, you don’t need to add more to get coverage in new areas. Conversely, in order to add more people to the existing internet, you have to run cables to each new city and house.

Second, satellites themselves are getting lighter and cheaper all the time. Cables on the other hand, are more limited in their capacity to get cheaper because at the end of the day, they need a lot of raw material to make.

Finally, there has been a lot recent innovation in the space sector. The Falcon Heavy rocket, launching this year should break the $1,000/pound mark, with a goal of getting down to as little as $100/pound.

It Will Get Faster Faster

Upgrading the speed of the internet now is difficult. Google is learning that the hard way through its Google Fiber initiative. It’s been 5 years since Google made the announcement, and it’s now in just 18 cities. In order to make this upgrade, Google needs to work with many stakeholders, navigate the regulatory landscape of local and state governments, and then finally build out expensive networks (servers, and yes tubes) on the ground.

With a space internet, all that needs to be done to upgrade the system is to launch new satellites (which will be lighter, cheaper, and faster than their counterparts), and possibly wait for devices to adopt new signal standards (which won’t take long when people naturally upgrade their phones every two years). All in all, you could have a new generation of satellites and devices that connect to them every few years. This is a dramatic speedup of the release cycle of new technology, and will accelerate how fast the internet is getting over time.

Death to the evil cable companies

The cable oligopolies are some of the worst run, morally bankrupt, and corrupt companies out there. Due to each of their monopoly status in their respective regions, their services are overpriced, unreliable, and their customer service is unfriendly. They have no competition, and thus no incentive to deliver a quality product, let alone innovate. To top it all off, they spend enormous sums of money bribing congress to do their bidding with downright awful legislation SOPA and PIPA as well as dismantling net neutrality.

I’ve got to believe that the new crop of companies trying to build a new space internet are better than this. Elon Musk and Greg Wyler have a good reputation, which is why I’m optimistic. If one or both of their respective efforts succeed, they will do so at the expense of the awful cable companies. I sincerely hope that 10 years from now I will never have to deal with a cable company again.

Hopefully not a naturally monopoly type of market

If this space internet is a true “disruptive innovation”, it could quickly become the de facto internet for the entire world. If this occurs, I really hope that there are multiple competing ‘systems’, instead of just one company that controls everything. The internet, and thus global communication, is far too important to let it be controlled by a single organization, or a single government. For now, that means that I’m rooting for both Elon Musk and Greg Wyler to succeed. In the future, I’m sure entire countries like China would want to launch their own space internet as well, and the more the merrier as far as I’m concerned.

Unclear Security and Privacy Implications

Right now it’s fairly easy for each country to control the internet within it’s borders. Just a few years ago Syria shut down the internet it’s the country during it’s civil war. China is so adept at censoring and manipulating the internet in it’s country that we refer to their efforts as building the Great Firewall of China. Perhaps most famous of all is the NSA, who have basically turned the internet into Orwellian surveilance system.

While it makes sense that countries can easily control the cables and servers that are in their own countries, it remains unclear how effective governments will be at controlling wireless transmissions to space. Will a space internet be easier or harder to hack? Can a government really block all communication to hundreds of satellites in space over their entire countries? Will it be easier for foreign governments block (or unblock) the internet in other countries? Will this level the playing field for non-state actors to try and gain control of the internet? Will having a space internet fuel a new space race among the world powers? What all these questions boil down to is who will control the flow of information in this new space internet.

Next Stop, Mars!

Most CEO’s of publically traded companies obsess over their quarterly earnings instead of figuring out how to build something that matters and creates value in the long run. It's unbelievably refreshing that Elon Musk talks about building a new space internet as being a necessary stepping stone to colonizing mars, something that will take decades (or more) to accomplish. It’s also refreshing when this lofty talk gets backed up by a billion dollar investment from Google. For far too long we’ve been dreaming too small, and setting our sights too low. It’s heartening to see such boldness, and I hope more of it is to come.