Tech billionaires are building a wireless, orbiting internet accessible in even the deepest jungle. The first satellites are already up - but do we really want it?

Jason Raish

AISHTAN SHAKARIAN knew there was money to be made from the internet. So she took a spade into the woods near where she lived, about 50 kilometres outside the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. The 75-year-old hoped to dig up copper wiring to sell for scrap. Instead, she cut through a fibre-optic cable – worthless to her, but priceless to the millions of people in neighbouring Armenia left staring at blank screens for 12 hours. She had cut off the country’s internet.

The 2011 incident shows how easily this can happen with underground cables, and those under the sea are even more vulnerable. Every few days, an earthquake, anchor or boat damages one of the roughly 430 sea-floor cables. Tonga went offline for nearly two weeks in January after an underwater cable was cut.

In some ways, as an isolated island nation, Tonga is lucky to have this connection. The cost of laying cables to remote places means only about 10 per cent of the planet’s surface has terrestrial communication links. According to the UN, nearly half the world’s population has never been online.

To reach them, and ensure everyone has a reliable connection, billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson plan to reinvent the internet – to free it from its Earthly roots and build a wireless web above our heads. Balloons in the stratosphere, constellations of satellites, cruising drones – there is no shortage of ideas. Pull this off and humanity’s greatest information repository would find a dazzlingly futuristic home. To make it work, we just need to deploy some old technology, albeit in a highly unusual way. …