Lantern and the Outernet

Around the year 1980, two blokes called Robert E. Kahn and Vint Cerf were successful in creating a network of networks, which is now known as the Internet. The ways in which we use the Internet in today's world is almost infinite, but in the past three and a half decades or so the Internet has only changed so much.

Nowadays, we cannot think of a passing a single day without Internet and most of us are certain that it is true for almost everyone living in this world, however, that is truly a misconception. A staggering 4.4 billion people around the world still don't have access to the Internet, that is more than half, around 60% of the world's population deprived of this spectacular technology. However, the Outernet is now here to fix that!

So what is this Outernet? According to the Wikipedia, the Outernet is a global broadcast data foundation, which aims to provide access to content from the web through  geostationary and Low Earth Orbit satellites. The best thing about Outernet is that it's available in any corner of the world for completely free of cost! Isn't that amazing? All you need is to create a signal receiver (dish) and once that's done you can connect your Wi-Fi enabled devices to connect to the Outernet. If you are not willing or able to create your own receiver, then you can just buy 'lantern', a device that connects to the space and enables you to access the Outernet.

So how does it work? The best way to explain would be to compare the radio with it. It works somewhat like a radio except the songs you listen to would be the information that you view is your smart devices. The lantern and the Outernet are infants when compared to the Internet. At this stage the developers are asking for our help to tell them what we need the most; information? education? emergency news? The Outernet has already gained wide recognition as the 'Humanity's Public Library', give it a few more years and people might slowly forget that Internet ever existed.

However, this concept is still very new, so we need to work together to make the world free from information poverty and censorship. Let's make our planet transparent and spread light equally over all of mankind.