A New York City-based company, the Media Development Investment Fund, plans to launch hundreds of low-cost miniature satellites known as “cubesats” into orbit around the Earth to create the Outernet, a wireless connection to the Web available for free to every person in the world.
The Outernet team claim that only 60% of the world's population currently have access to the wealth of knowledge that can be found on the Internet. Using a technique known as User Datagram Protocol (UDP) multitasking, which is the sharing of data between users on a network, Outernet will beam information to users.
Their ultimate goal will be to beginning deploying the Outernet satellites into Earth orbit, which they say can begin in June 2015.
The project also faces extreme resistance from telecoms, the traditional gatekeepers of the Internet. Citizens of countries like China and North Korea that have censored online activity could be given free and unrestricted cyberspace.
Will this be another project sponsored by different national security agencies?
