For Google, space may really be its final frontier. Shortly after the company arranged for exclusive access to a new imaging satellite comes word that it’s backing a venture to use satellites to provide broadband to a poorly served swathe of equatorial Africa. The project hopes to piggyback on the growing cellphone infrastructure in this corner of the developing world in order to provide service in areas that aren’t really touched by fiber. The new venture is a startup called O3b networks, named for the ‘other 3 billion’ that aren’t currently getting Internet service. Although the first deployments will be in Africa, the company hopes to eventually deploy its access model across other poorly served areas of the globe. That model takes into account a couple of realities that are sometimes ignored in plans to connect the developing world. Equatorial Africa is vast, politically fragmented, and unstable. No private entity is likely to put up the money necessary to provide and maintain comprehensive access to fiber in the region, and assistance from other governments has primarily focused on wiring up academic centers that tend to be in the already-developed regions of the continent. The solution, in O3b’s […]