Hey, it's Teddy. This week, Recode Daily is on spring break. All week will be bringing you our favorite episodes from the last few months.

Hope you enjoy and see you again next Monday.

The Internet. It's how we work, how we go to school, how we see friends and family.

But not everyone has a good connection.

And that's where a few tech companies come in with a sort of modest proposal.

What if we got our internet from outer space?

Adam Clark Estes, deputy editor at Recode, wrote about this and it's here to talk about it.

Hey, Adam.

Hey, Teddy.

So one surprising thing in your story that a lot of people probably don't already know is that a lot of listeners already get their internet via satellite.

That's how we get Wi-Fi on planes, for instance.

So why hasn't this taken off more broadly?

Satellite Internet has historically been just a little bit subpar when you compare it

to terrestrial Wi-Fi.

You're down on planet Earth, we have fiber optic cables, which basically have unlimited bandwidth.

And to do satellite internet, you're basically beaming a connection from a terrestrial network up to a satellite and back down.

And the technology just hasn't been good enough to get enough bandwidth to enough people so that it compares to terrestrial broadband,

the kind of internet you might get from a Verizon or Time Warner.

But that's starting to change with new satellite technology and what are called

constellations of satellites.

And has the pandemic at all sort of raised the stakes for this work and made it more urgent,

less urgent? Tell me about that.

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