But Musk seems to be counting on his orbital network doing something those atmosphere-hugging projects can't: create a better, faster internet. I'm not talking about speed here, but latency - the delay data undergoes when traversing the globe. When connecting in San Jose to a server in Sydney, your request is hitting multiple routers before it even arrives at the undersea cable to begin its long journey across the Pacific, and all of those steps introduce latency.
Musk claims he can build a purer, simpler internet in the heavens. Though any traffic would have to got through the Earth's atmosphere twice, once that data stream is 750 miles up, it would make only a few satellite hops across a near vacuum, through which electromagnetic waves travel much faster than through a fiber optic cable. So what Musk is promising to do is not only build an internet to connect the furthest corners of the planet, but a create a network that would draw those far corners much closer together.
There's enough of a difference between Loon and Musk's plan, that Google may view them as complimentary technologies, and according to the Information's report, Google is considering investing in the SpaceX project.
