Imagine the end of poor connections, dropped signals, and Internet service monopolies. Imagine broadband Internet access not only across rural America but also across rural South America and rural Africa. Imagine a network of over 4,000 satellites in orbit around Earth, just 600 to 700 miles up, streaming cat videos across the world as fast as the wired connection you get from your cable company.

Oh wait, don’t bother imagining any of that. Elon Musk, the founder of Paypal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX, has done all the imagining for you, and he’s making his imagination a reality. Not only has he declared his intent to create a system just like this (read this article from TheVerge.com for a good overview), but earlier this month he asked the FCC for permission to test his new satellite system in Seattle, reports GeekWire. He expects to start launching satellites next year, to start offering ISP-style service in 2019, and to be earning a decent buck by 2020. That’s 4,425 low-Earth-orbit satellites offering subscription Internet access to everyone, everywhere.

Is this all a pipe dream? Well, citing a Wall Street Journal investigation, Ars Technica reports that as of July this year, internal documents from Musk’s SpaceX company project higher profits from selling Internet service than from launching rockets.

• Musk believes satellite Internet will prove a windfall for the company. Since Alphabet [edit note: Google’s new corporate umbrella] invested $1 billion in SpaceX in 2015, the rocket company has been working toward the launch of thousands of satellites that would provide Internet around the globe. The newspaper reported that SpaceX eventually plans to launch 4,000 communications satellites, which would be dozens of times larger than any other constellation, with the first phase of this possibly going online as early as 2018. SpaceX anticipates that the satellite business will become more profitable than the rocket business by 2020, generating tens of billions of dollars by the mid-2020s.

That’s me boldifying the revenue line, because Wow! Elon Musk expects to make higher profits as an Internet service provider than as a rocket scientist.

And Google is hedging its bet with a less ambitious plan to put about 200 of its own satellites into space to provide global Internet services, as reported in TheVerge.com. Somebody is going to make this idea work in the short-term future.

The implications are staggering. What will happen when people in every autocratic nation have unfettered access to the Internet? When the cable companies lose their monopolies on broadband delivery? What’s Elon Musk’s opinion on Net Neutrality? That may sound flip, but the man personally owns 57% of SpaceX, after all.

But all that is beyond my ability to predict. Instead, let’s change our focus. In general, my columns tend to look at U.S. trends in subscription service, pretty much ignoring the rest of the world. Given the primacy of the American market, that’s maybe not unreasonable, but when Musk begins offering the same subscription data business to the whole world, well, maybe we should step back and look at the entire globe for this post. As a stand-in for the global data business generally, I want to take a look at two global trends: Mobile Broadband and SVOD.

SUBSCRIPTION VIDEO ON DEMAND — AROUND THE WORLD

Although I’ve written about SVOD in more detail, let’s look at global trends as a way to gauge the global data market. First, you can see the way the U.S. dominates — and is expected to continue to dominate:

(Source: Digital TV Research via Statista)

However, the number of video subscribers is predicted to grow worldwide:

(Source: Digital TV Research via Statista)

Here’s another take on the total global number of digital video users:

(Source: Statista)

Here’s a look at global VOD revenue, in billions of Euros:

(Source: IDATE via Statista)

In general, the forecast is for fast global growth. According to a Midia report by Mark Mulligan, “the non-US market is growing fast.” Jim O’Neill at VideoMind agrees:

• “The global VOD market brought in $48.93 billion in revenues … up from $45.03 billion in 2014. The researcher forecast that the market will continue to grow through 2026 at a CAGR of 8.3%. Much of the growth will be driven by younger viewers, as animation VOD – which was valued at $7.38 billion in 2014 — is forecast to expand at a 9.7% CAGR. But the highest growth market for VOD is expected to be Asia Pacific (excluding Japan), mostly due to a rapidly growing subscriber base with high speed Internet service in the region.

And of course, video services are bandwidth hogs. As Internet subscription services expand their reach, one of the big drivers of capacity will be the demand for Friends reruns and action movies.

GLOBAL TRENDS IN MOBILE BROADBAND

According to reports, it will take a device the size of a laptop to get into the new SpaceX Internet service. However, if there’s one thing that I’ve learned since my days punching cards for a run through a building-sized mainframe (and yes, I did do that in the early ’80s in college), it’s that electronics get smaller. Okay, so at first, it won’t be smartphones that you use to get online via the SpaceX network. Eventually it will be, I predict, and so it might be wise to keep in mind that the developing world loves cell phones:

(Source: ITU via Statista)

Another look at similar data by another source reveals that the world beyond U.S. borders is definitely getting on the mobile broadband bandwagon:

(Source: ZDNet via Statista)

That’s a zero-sum market share graph. If one were to look at the total subscription picture, the growth is remarkable:

(Source: ITU via Statista)

That’s almost 8 billion subscriptions projected by the end of this year. The global mobile revenue picture (not including non-mobile revenue) is already a trillion-dollar business:

(Source: GSMA and Statista)

Relatedly, last month’s report on broadband mobile by Ericsson Research offered a remarkable correlation that concluded: “mobile broadband boosts the economy.”

• The report reveals that as mobile broadband penetration increases by 10 percent, it causes a 0.6-2.8 percent rise in GDP. This study has been able to conclude that the introduction of mobile broadband has an immediate positive effect on a country’s economy, and a longer-term knock-on effect as mobile broadband gradually spreads to different economies. … Many countries in the developing world have used mobile broadband technology to leapfrog in their economic development in the past 10-15 years.”

The net result may well be that an increase in Internet access will have all kinds of positive economic results, including, per the above, increases in GDP. When you measure mobile broadband growth as a stand-in for Internet service demand in general, it becomes clear that delivering data to subscribers around the world is potentially huge.

Insider Take

Billions of people across Planet Earth are hungry for data services; globally, we’re already talking about a trillion-dollar-plus market that shows every sign of continued growth. The companies that are able to target that market, whether SpaceX or Google or some other players, will be sitting pretty, considering that just about every human being is a potential data subscriber. When it becomes truly possible to serve data globally — and in just a few short years it will be — the ripples and ramifications will be incredible, from business to economics to politics to standard of living to entertainment. It really will be a worldwide web.