Broadband for the Planet

[Tuckerfan]

Neat idea, I think.

Imagine a series of at least three geosynchronous orbital satellites providing wireless Internet access to the entire world. That’s exactly what a project called SWANsat or Super-Wide Area Network Satellite plans to do by the year 2011. They intend to be a global broadband Internet service provider that can facilitate up to 600 million connections per satellite. All you need is a handheld mobile device to connect to the system.

The system is being designed by a collective of inventors, builders, GPS and Iridium satellite owners including the CEO of Western Digital. Many more companies and individuals are also driving the SWANsat project including a UN task force.

As a business model it will provide the following services to subscribers for about an average cost of US $100 per month.

Sounds cool, especially since they’ll be giving steep discounts to developing nations, but I have to wonder how Iran’s going to feel about it.

Iran’s internet service providers (ISPs) have started reducing the speed of Internet access to homes and cafes based on new government-imposed limits, a move critics said appeared to be part of a clampdown on the media.

An official said last week that ISPs were now “forbidden” by the Telecommunications Ministry from providing Internet connections faster than 128 kilobytes per second (KBps), the official IRNA news agency reported. He did not give a reason.

Internet technicians say speeds of 256 KBps, 512 KBps or higher are increasingly common internationally. Iranian surfers will now find it much slower to download music or anything else from the Web. Businesses have not been affected by the move.