Internet's final frontier

摘要

The race is on to build a new kind of internet. A host of companies and billions of dollars are in play, with the ultimate goal of ringing the planet with satellites that will allow anyone, anywhere, to get online at broadband speeds. Presently, satellite internet relies on spacecraft that are in geosynchronous orbit, travelling at the same speed as Earth rotates. But while this ensures the satellites are always in the same spot above Earth, it means there is a large time lag in the service, as radio waves take a quarter of a second to make the round trip up to a geosynchronous satellite and back. Added to the time for the other trips your data must take across the rest of the internet, the lag becomes unworkable for realtime applications like video or voice chat (see diagram, right).