Making Worldwide Broadband a Reality
Elon Musk is up to it again. He’s announced a plan to launch around 700 satellites that will provide high-speed Internet service to the entire world, and now Google is reportedly backing the project with a cool $1B investment.
We happen to know more than a few things about satellite Internet. Not long after we launched our first product, the Connectify Hotspot virtual router, our team was asked to develop some white-labelled software for a major satellite Internet company. In fact, our frustration in working with slow satellite connections was an impetus for developing Speedify.
The Hurdles
1. Limited Spectrum
2. Latency will be bad
3. Bandwidth (and latency) will be variable
4. Need to see the sky to get a working link
Enter Speedify
By now, you may realize why I’m excited: all of this makes every SpaceX Internet user into a potential Speedify user, too. Speedify’s ability to adjust for changes in latency and lost packets, will simply make SpaceX Internet links faster.
It gets even better for many of our users in parts of the world where less-than-desirable DSL and 3G speeds are the norm. With Speedify, The SpaceX link can be bonded with other available Internet connections to create a single, faster and more reliable Internet connection. Speedify’s smarts means it always knows exactly how well the satellite link is working: when it’s good, the satellite network gets more traffic, but as latency increases or bandwidth shrinks, Speedify knows to rely more heavily on the DSL connection. So, while SpaceX engineers work on some of the hard problems I outlined above, I’m excited to see this simple equation come to life…