14 DAY TRIAL // Google's Eric Schmidt recently said that the world's five billion people who aren't connected to the internet will be in the next five years. Granted, he also said that we'd all be using Google TVs by now, so his predictions have slightly larger error rate than Nostradamus'.
That said, the world is coming online and fast. Just not fast enough for Google, which is why the company is working on expanding wireless networks in developing countries to help the other five billion of us catch up.
The Wall Street Journal reports, citing unnamed sources, that Google is working on partnering with local telcos and governments to make wireless internet available in under-developed regions, away from urban areas.
Google is working on several solutions, on all fronts. The most obvious is using so-called white space, the portion of the radio spectrum normally reserved for TV broadcasts. This isn't that much of a secret, Google itself that it's experimenting with the technology in South Africa.
Broadcasts all over the world are switching from analog digital freeing up some channels. But there's no guarantee that the switch has completed in many of the places Google targets.
Another idea is using balloons with antennas, using other frequencies than TV broadcast ones, which could cover huge areas while being relatively inexpensive. That's one of the projects Google [x] is rumored to be working on.
The company is also said to be working on new, inexpensive Android phones to make use of these networks.
The Journal claims Google wants to offer internet connections to one billion people through the project which focuses on Sub Saharan Africa and South East Asia.
To reach that many people, white space is the only viable solution, but, again, the spectrum isn't available in many places, especially in urban areas where larger swatches of the population is located.
Maybe a billion people is a stretch, but Google has been talking a lot about thinking big and bringing internet to even several millions of people qualifies as big.