Digital Life

Those of us who follow the internet business are always looking for the next ‘big thing’.

My prophecies in this area are as bad as anyone’s – though I can boast that, 20 years ago, I noted here that Google looked promising and recommended that Oldie- readers try it.

That may well have been my last accurate prediction – but I’ve just spotted something the extraordinary billionaire Elon Musk has been up to for a little while, which might well be my next one.

Having made his money with Paypal, Musk has invested in Tesla cars and many other things, including Spacex. This is a space rocket company which has the rather optimistic – not to say whimsical – ambition of ‘making humanity interplanetary’.

However, Spacex also has a very practical and potentially lucrative division called Starlink. This is currently placing thousands of satellites in our skies, with the aim of providing highspeed internet to anyone in the world, independent of local infrastructure or any other sort of control, government or otherwise.

Necessity is usually the mother, or at least the midwife, of invention. At the moment, one of the internet’s biggest unfulfilled needs is not what humans can achieve online; that develops steadily with demand and without help. No, the yawning gap worldwide is simply the physical availability of the internet – especially fast internet.

Your computer needs an individual and direct connection to your internet service provider before it can do anything. The faster the data can flow between you both, the better. In most countries, that connection is usually made using fast fibre-optic cables and slower copper wires or, more often, a mixture of both.

This has obvious limitations, especially for remote areas, and I have long felt that there must be a better solution.

There is. Musk is creating a network of satellites that will cover the globe. Anyone, wherever they are, can pay to connect to them; all you will need is some equipment that costs less than an iphone. No need for any wires, telephone poles or holes in the road.

The scale of his efforts is bewildering. He already has the world’s largest satellite fleet (over 1,000) up there, and the current target is for about 40,000 satellites to be launched before long and probably 100,000 satellites eventually, covering the whole world. Yes, the whole world. He’s not wasting time. Starlink is manufacturing and launching about 120 satellites per month and hopes to achieve ‘near-global coverage of the populated world in 2021’.

The technical achievement is astonishing, too; a mesh of thousands of interconnected satellites all moving at high speed. What’s even better – it actually works.

I did wonder about the chances of collisions, but they have anti-collision equipment. When you stop to consider that there are getting on for two billion vehicles in the world, and the satellites aren’t a lot bigger than cars, 100,000 doesn’t sound so many.

The service is currently expensive ($100 per month) and limited to bits of the USA. But time will sort that out (Europe is next), mainly because Musk is not alone. Amazon (who else?) is looking at launching something similar. The Government has an interest in Oneweb, which has the same aspirations; BT is already talking to it.

This is also fascinating from a political perspective. The idea of an unfettered internet being available to anyone in the world with the right bit of kit is bound to cause unease in countries where they like to control the flow of information.

Every so often you need a maverick gazillionaire to shake things up a bit. If Musk sticks to his guns, this could easily be my second accurate prediction of a ‘big thing’.