Imagine walking through a remote jungle south of the equator, pulling out your phone, and seeing the green Republic arc in the top left corner of your screen. Awesome, right? Well, Elon Musk, the visionary behind Tesla and SpaceX, is trying to turn that scenario into a reality by taking the Internet above the clouds.
Earlier this year, Musk announced his plans to create a network of satellites that would beam high speed internet access to nearly every corner of the globe. According to a Bloomberg Business article, the initiative would deploy hundreds of WiFi-beaming satellites into space at a much closer altitude than that of traditional satellites, reducing the distance for signals to travel.
In the Space Internet venture, a data packet would get sent to space, moving through the network of satellites until reaching the one closest to its destination, the data packet would then be beamed back down to earth. Taking the data packet into space would increase the speed of the Internet and allow it to reach remote regions of the world that currently don’t have access through fiber. “The speed of light is 40 percent faster in the vacuum of space than it is for fiber,” Musk says. “The long-term potential is to be the primary means of long-distance Internet traffic and to serve people in sparsely populated areas.”
A globe (and Mars!) covered in WiFi, keeping you connected everywhere you go…as if Elon Musk wasn’t already cool enough. Although Musk says not to expect this service for at least 5 years, it’s innovation like this that gets us excited at Republic. Just four short years ago, we had a hunch that WiFi was the network of the future and in just a few more years, we could be making WiFi calls from space! Innovation makes the world a better place, and it’s people like Elon Musk, with a dream and determination, that will keep pushing the envelope for what is possible. And, pretty soon, WiFi really will be EVERYWHERE!