At CloudExpo last week, a discussion about IoT security included a pitch for a high-flying company starting to make some big claims. SpaceBelt, organized by Cloud Constellation Corp., is a proposed network of laser communication, spanning the Earth in a network not so much connected to the Internet as parallel to it. Its supporters list this separate digital location as one of SpaceBelt’s advantages over existing satellite networks: completely compartmentalized, it could be more secure than an Earth-based network.
CEO and cofounder Scott Sobhani spoke about how the SpaceBelt’s isolation could allow for greater security and could bypass cross-national or cross-jurisdictional restrictions. However, that requires a lot of legislation and organization that isn’t yet in place.
The first step, Sobhani said, is to put seven or eight in-orbit satellites in orbit. They’re aiming to cover that with a $375 million budget, a price that Sobhani said is enabled by their “brute force” approach and by employees with experience in the aerospace sector.
The data handled by the satellites will be in a space that operates almost like an embassy, under its own diplomatic jurisdiction. Countries will be able to fence off their own information. This will all be coordinated through the International Telecommunications Union, Sobhani said.
SpaceBelt is taking “priority spot requests” now for cloud service providers and institutions who want to be the first into space when the satellites go up. Currently, they’re in talks with four major satellite and launch vendors, but have not yet finalized and signed contracts, and so have not released details about those partnerships. Their target date to launch the satellites is late 2018.
Filed Under: M2M (machine to machine)