Free broadcast from space to phone.

One to many broadcast

Most connectivity is two-way and heavy: towers, fiber, power, billing. On the ground or giant expensive satellites the size of a squash court. Broadcast is the opposite shape. A single transmitter in orbit can reach everyone in its footprint at the same time, and the receiver can be a cheap, low-power device with no subscription and no network of its own.

Kilakila tests datacasting: sending information over wide areas as a one-way broadcast, like FM radio for data. Because the link is one-way and intermittent, content is chunked, carried, and reassembled whenever a pass happens — receivers collect it over time, the way a barrel collects rain, so there's no such thing as a "missed" connection.

The project began when ALLFED asked how to coordinate feeding people through a global catastrophe with the internet down. Phase one proposed and prototyped a humanitarian, low-cost, open satellite communication system, secured broadcast spectrum and a launch seat, and put Kilakila on orbit in June 2025. 

Satellites are a hard way to serve one region well — they sweep the whole planet and visit any place only briefly. For steady disaster response, a promising next shape is high-altitude platform stations: solar-electric aircraft or aerostats that can loiter over one region for weeks, acting as a broadcast mast in the sky, deployable to where the need is. We are investigating partnerships for satellites and high altitude planes where bi-directional communication is easiest.