Mike Elgan over at Cult of Mac suggests that Apple should build a satellite iPhone.

Just to give you a sense of scale and proportion, Apple could probably buy any one of the existing satellite phone providers for less than $3 billion. (Apple has more than $125 billion in cash.) Better yet, Apple should develop it’s own high-speed, high-capacity global satellite network, which it could do for less than $5 billion, I would imagine. Note that running its own satellite system would be expensive. But it would make Apple a wireless carrier, and a global one — for decades.

Personally, I think it’s a nifty idea for Apple to get into the carrier business, especially as a market-disrupting force that covers international boundaries. But satellite is an insane way to go about it.

First and foremost, the speed of light isn’t fast enough. Getting data to and from low-earth orbit adds latency to all data requests and incoming replies. It gives an overall impression of slow connections, even if the actual transmission is speedy. And forget about gaming.

Second, a $3 billion investment in satellites is something you generally have to repeat every few years when you upgrade the damn things.

Third: think you have trouble getting signal indoors now?

That said, fantastic idea if Apple decides to go with a new technology to do it. I’ve been enamored of mesh networks for a long while, where every device is a router for every signal. Stick a couple fat pipes into a city, put a mesh router on every iPad and iPhone (hell, every MacBook too), and boom, you’ll have the best coverage you’ve ever seen on any network, with minimal installation costs. Contract out a failover to an MVNO, and you’re done.