When the folks at Astranis, a startup coming out of stealth today to bring broadband internet connectivity to uncovered areas of the world, attempted their initial communications last month with the first satellite they’d launched into space, there was no response.

They’d constructed a ground station in Fairbanks, Alaska, for communicating with their small geostationary satellites, but they couldn’t reach the one that at that moment was rotating the Earth at roughly a thousand miles an hour. “It was this mystery,” recalls John Gedmark, Astranis’s CEO.

It wasn’t competitors trying to sabotage them, or faulty manufacturing or software. It wasn’t a problem with the satellite. It was because the transmitter atop the college radio station at the nearby school was inadvertently jamming the startup’s communications. A phone call or two later, they worked out a solution, and it was game on for Astranis’s first test of its new satellite. But the episode illustrated one thing, Gedmark says: “This stuff is hard.”

There are 4 billion people on Earth without access to broadband internet, and the market for new broadband coverage in such areas is growing 30% a year. That’s why everyone from Facebook to Alphabet to SpaceX, and many others, are trying to come up with myriad ways to get connectivity to people with none at all, or at least no broadband.

With $18 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz in hand, Astranis is pursuing an approach it believes has never been tried before: inexpensive, small geostationary satellites that can each have 10 gigabytes per second of capacity for covering an area the size of a small- or even mid-sized country.

Although Gedmark, previously the cofounder and executive director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, certainly hopes his company can help bring broadband to people in the third world who will benefit from it, he’s motivated in part by his own upbringing in Kentucky, one of the least broadband-penetrated states in America. “People want to think about 4 billion people not online in the developing world,” he says, “but it’s actually [still] a problem here in the richest country in the world.”

Thanks to the building out of a global infrastructure that now makes it easy and relatively inexpensive to put small satellites—that are on the order of about 660 pounds–into space, as well as frequent cargo launches by companies like SpaceX, as well as Astranis’s own use of software-defined radio technology, the company is hopeful it can make an impact starting with its first commercial launch sometime in 2019.