If global internet access can really be achieved with a 12 billion dollar investment, I have no idea why Facebook spent 19 billion on WhatsApp over this, especially since Zuckerberg just said his goal is to make "basic internet services affordable for everyone".
Would you like a real answer? 'cuz I can give you one. 1) There's no profit in it. If "global internet for everyone" made its money back, Iridium and Globalstar would be all over it. They're not, though, 'cuz their profit point is over a buck a megabyte. And Iridium has already gone bankrupt once. 2) Talking to a cubesat is no small feat. Unlike one of the DirecTV birds, which you just sort of point at, Cubesats require shortwave gear. Which requires training. And patience. And, not to put too fine a point on it, a substantial investment. I'm not much of a ham, but my understanding is an FT-817 is kind of a minimum. 3) The lower the orbit, the less time the bird spends above the horizon. Cubesats are generally dumped pretty far down because otherwise they don't have the juice to talk to earth. We're not in a "Satellite uplink" kind of space, we're in a "chase Sputnik across the sky" kind of space. And yeah, if you've got a swarm of Cubesats all on the same network maybe you can make it work better but that also makes it easier to block in places like North Korea. Yeah, there are places that just want the Internet but for them, a cell tower is a lot more pragmatic. You can put up a lot of poles for 100k. 4) quarter second ping times. No joke. Just bouncing up and coming back down is 240-280ms. A cubesat is likely to be in the sky a little longer than the ISS, but even that's just a few minutes. Real asynchronous communication is gonna be fiddly as fuck. Somewhere on Reddit I had a conversation with a guy on Rapa Nui. he was trying to figure out how to get high speed internet. There just wasn't any. I spent two hours digging into the problem - not even Intelsat could help his ass out because Easter Island is so far out there they don't even bother parking comsats anywhere near it. The whole island is on basically one DSL line, which probably makes surfing Reddit an exercise in patience... but he found a way. Global internet is a lot more likely to come terrestrially. Satellites aren't just expensive, they're a long damn ways away. Unless there's thousands of miles of ocean between you and your ISP, a cellular network works a treat.
So I'm guessing you have the same opinion re: Google Loon?Global internet is a lot more likely to come terrestrially.
Cubesat altitude: 350,000-400,000 m. Stratospheric balloon altitude: 20,000m. Thing that keeps cubesats in space: shit tons of delta-v. Thing that keeps stratospheric balloons at altitude: shit tons of noble gas. They aren't without their problems, but they're different problems.