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Samsung makes a lot of things that you might not realize, from medical technology to automated drone guns, but a new paper from the company’s Texas head of R&D Farooq Khan shows just how widely the company is willing to think these days. Rather than proposing a new break into consumer or even corporate electronics, this report entitled Mobile Internet from the Heavens imagines a constellation of Samsung satellites orbiting the Earth, providing unlimited mobile internet to every corner of the planet.

The report lays out the case for and basic structure of a future Samsung space-based internet program. It notes that the global demand for data seems to be increasing by an order of magnitude (a multiple of ten) every five years or so. This means that by 2028, the human race may be chewing through a zetabyte of data per month — or about 200 gigabytes per month, for five billion users. The plan imagines a fleet of about 4,600 small satellites would be able to provide this amount of data — though there’s no mention of what it might have to charge users to pay for it.

The longer, space-based path for information may actually be faster, if done correctly.

The paper proposes to get around latency issues by positioning the satellites physically closer to Earth than previous plans. Most modern communications satellites live in geostationary orbit, roughly 35,000 kilometers above the surface, and this imposes a hard limit on speed due to travel time for the data transmissions. Samsung wants to position its constellation in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and thus reduce this delay — that’s part of the reason it requires so many satellites, since no one individual unit will remain fixed over a particular patch of ground, and they have to compensate with sheer number of units.

To have both the coverage and the bandwidth required for modern internet use, the plan would require access to multiple areas of the RF spectrum, switching between them as necessary to maintain a wide and continuous connection.

The goal of planet-spanning space-based internet has occurred to several Big Thinkers in the past several years, most importantly Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s OneWeb. Facebook has explored the internet via planes, and Google has its balloon project — everybody sees the possible value of owning the next-generation of global internet. The investment is very safe from immediate competition — if you think laying new physical lines across a continent presents a high barrier to entry for prospective new entrants to the industry, try launching thousands of satellites.

If we leave aside the impact of actual philanthropy (tech giants certainly like the idea of helping third-world populations, but it’s not their raison d’être) the incentive is still obvious: not only do you get to sell high speed internet to the remaining global majority that still lives without it, but you also get to bias them toward using your services on the internet. Though it wasn’t as tied to the launch of satellites, Facebook’s Internet.org is an attempt to achieve much the same thing: give people without adequate access to the internet a subsidized version of it, in exchange for the chance to expose them to your version of the internet, first.

Earlier attempts to put the internet in space have all failed. Bill Gates backed the Teledesic initiative, which proposed several hundred satellites, while Iridium and GlobalStar also folded despite proposing only a few dozen satellites each. In all cases, it was the practical cost of installing and running the service that tanked their dreams; for Samsung, SpaceX, or OneWeb to see any real success for these plans, they’ll need a very economical launch system. A space elevator would be ideal, letting them schlep large amounts of technology into space very easily.

Until then, though, cost will remain the biggest impediment to any initiative like this. Selling the internet in India and Africa will require a low barrier to entry, while launch to space remains one of the more expensive plans it’s possible to attempt. The hope is that the sheer volume of potential customers will offset the overall cost — and the telecom world will certainly be stronger if they’re right.