> A key employee leading Google Inc.'s efforts to beam Internet access from satellites has left the company and is now working closely with Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and its founder Elon Musk, according to people familiar with the matter.

> When he left, Mr. Wyler took with him the rights to certain radio spectrum that could be used to provide Internet access

http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-satellite-executive-greg-...

I don't have access to the article so I don't know if it addresses my question but... How in hell can a single employee "Take with him" the radio-electric spectrum allocation???

If you google "greg wyler" and then click the wsj link you can visit the full article.

But as to your question, it appears that he joined google from a company he founded that owned the rights, then left and took the rights with him and formed a new company to control the rights again.

> When he left, Mr. Wyler took with him the rights to certain radio spectrum that could be used to provide Internet access, according to a person familiar with the matter. The person said Mr. Wyler had formed a new venture, WorldVu Satellites Ltd., that designs satellite systems and controls the rights to that spectrum.

> Brian Holz and David Bettinger, who joined Google with Mr. Wyler from O3b Networks Ltd., also have left Google, according to the person familiar with the matter. O3b is a private satellite company founded by Mr. Wyler.

Google invested in SpaceX in order to fund this Internet satellite project.

Call me crazy, but wouldn't it make sense to have servers on the satellite?

Solar energy + lower latency. Cooling is still a problem in vacuum though.

Commodity hardware goes obsolete quickly and fails frequently. Satellite-grade hardware is much older and slower than what we use for today's websites. Putting anything into orbit is expensive. Energy is much more expensive in orbit than on the ground. And it's not like the majority of your customers are going to be satellite internet users.

If you use regular hardware you'd have to worry about bits getting flipped by radiation, which could cause some big problems depending on what your server is doing. Unfortunately radiation-resistant hardware is super expensive (maybe not a problem) and super slow (probably a problem)

You're not going to have much computational capability especially given the mass.

It's much cheaper to build a server into each ground station.

Is there no room for competing networks offering global internet access?

Additional article:

http://spacenews.com/spacex-google-matchup-sets-up-satellite...

Google is interested in deploying a global data network, hitting all the places that have never seen a fiber installer. They're pursuing every avenue available for that simultaneously - long-endurance balloons, solar drones, and LEO satellites; They are involved in SpaceX's project.

Satellite broadband is likely to always be an order of magnitude more expensive than terrestrial. It also has a very limited capacity in any given area. I don't know if they're pursuing this, but at Teledesic, we looked at hybrid models where when demand got large enough in any given geographic area, you could use a blimp to serve customers in the existing spectrum with the same user terminals. So, it could prove very complimentary to Loon (assuming both actually work).

As mentioned up thread, the size of the ground-side antenna is likely to be the size of a full laptop, so not something handheld. So this project would provide the back bone, and the Project Loon balloons would provide the "last mile", as it were.