Outernet redundancy when uploading data

Othernet Technologies
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I was reading the thread here, the initial question being about how Outernet currently sends data to the satellites:
http://discuss.outernet.is/t/how-does-outernet-send-data-to-its-sats-now/1655

The post below is probably a lot of questions and pretty verbose. Sorry in advance, I guess?

That discussion turned to a vision about the eventual two-way communication via Outernet, but it inspired be to post up about a related question that’s been on my mind for a while:
On your Indiegogo campaign for the Lantern, you mentioned that the Lantern would be a great device for “grid down” situations to receive data - worldwide disaster updates, weather data, important news, that sort of thing. This is one of the primary use cases I have for the device.
I know your intent has shifted somewhat towards primarily educational material for developing nations, but my question, I think, still remains relevant.

What happens if the “grid” goes down on the sending end? Syed mentioned that data basically streams to the teleport/ground station over the internet. What if the internet/power/whatever else goes offline for the office sending the data, the teleport itself, or the backbone between the two? What if disaster strikes the US?

It’s entirely cool to me if the present answer is that there’s nothing in place - but I sincerely hope one of your goals is to achieve some redundancy in that area. Multiple places that would stream content to multiple teleports, and some kind of failover order would definitely be useful.

Similarly - your present content delivery, as I understand it, is highly dependent on the satellite provider. What would happen if the provider suddenly went bankrupt and stopped operating? Is there a plan for multiple different companies, or perhaps to eventually take over some of the actual ground station work yourselves? How would you get the information out to your “subscribers” (for lack of a better term) if you have to switch providers/satellites/transponders?

I imagine most of my scenarios are beyond your design goals and a little bit on the extreme side, but I feel like it’s worth some thought, and I’m curious what your current strategies and future plans are.

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This is the question I came to ask, but put more eloquently than I could ever have hoped to achieve.

One day when the grid goes down long enough for your power backups to fail, will we be without important updates? I assume there is some level of redundancy in your system, but I am curious at what level of outage will the system become useless. I would hope that you have the ability to transmit using a device similar to the receivers you offer, and a group of select individuals around the globe with the ability to provide updates as needed. Any reasonable reassurance that the system is disaster proof would be appreciated.

Thank You,

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Unfortunately, we can offer no guarantee that the system is disaster proof.

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Pe_ter: It’s not often I’m called eloquent, thank you.

Syed: thanks for confirming my suspicions. Do you have any idea if you’ll ever plan to become more resilient? I’m not looking for a guarantee and understand you can’t provide one, I’m just wondering if it’s on the radar at all.

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Same here, not looking for a guarantee but I would love to know if there are plans.

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We would love to have that type of resiliency, but that kind of robustness comes at a cost, which we can’t allocate at the moment. It’s really best to consider us as a best-effort service. I hope that one day we’ll be much more.