Google Aims to Bring Broadband To Africa > blimp broadband

blimp broadband

Anyone know whether the Hughes\WB sats are low earth orbit or not? Also, with Google they seem to be able to run their network right on the ground, so could probably get sub-500ms latency round trip from their sats. Also, they'll be selling bandwidth wholesale, so they'll probably just be an uplink provider for the various cell phone companies. If the cell companies can use cheap satellite access instead of running T1's through the underbrush (which they likely won't do) they can provide customers with EDGE or even 3G service. Granted, even an HSPA network would likely have 600 ms internet latency in this case, but it's cetainly better than nothing and Google is wanting to be a part in it. After all, more people connected means more eyeballs for their ads. It doesn't take a low-latency, high-bandwidth connection to deliver a few frames of AdSense

Go Google!

In short, people have to backhaul to somewhere and Google is that backhaul.

True, but Google also has the cash to put a sat up in the air to get between the jungles of darkest Africa and the rest of the internet world. Granted, they're only an "investor" in the effort, but they seem to be betting on wireless internet (see their investment in ClearWire) to get people looking at the internet and, by extension, their ad network.

Oh, and if their sites load faster than others', it's not a breach of net neutrality. It just happens to be that the sites are connected directly to the network Google's serving If this isn't net neutrality, I like Google's version of non-net-neutrality