As the World Economic Forum highlighted in a report earlier this year, while our increasingly hyperconnected world brings many benefits, it also exacerbates inequalities for those large portions of the global population that have limited or no internet access.
Recently, though, two initiatives — Google’s Project Loon and Mark Zuckerberg’s internet.org — have drawn widespread attention to the challenge of using alternative delivery platforms to bring low cost broadband access to unserved or underserved parts of the world.
Project Loon plans to bring internet access to remote locations via a network of high-altitude balloons. As Google describes it, “People can connect to the balloon network using a special Internet antenna attached to their building. The signal bounces from this antenna up to the balloon network, and then down to the global Internet on Earth.
Internet.org is taking a similar approach, except instead of balloons, it envisions using drones as the delivery platform.
The benefits of an all-wireless network in the sky are clear. Such a network would be far less expensive, far less disruptive and take far less time to build than implementing a wired / land based infrastructure over very large swaths of the earth where no communications infrastructure currently exists. But are such networks just hype or could they really work?
via Wired
Image: Google (Project Loon) via YouTube
