In 2009 students from the University of Michigan brought satellite communications to a remote African village in Kenya. Since the village has no source of electricity, the students used solar power to drive the satellite equipment and the computers. By combining two high technologies -- solar with satellite -- the village now has satellite TV and the Internet.
In 2001 students at Stanford University launched the OPAL satellite. OPAL stands for Orbiting Satellite Automated Launcher. Since lifting objects into space is difficult, the overall goal is to make satellites as small as possible. The OPAL satellite is about the size of a suitcase, but is fully functional. Once in space, it launched even smaller satellites about the size of a wallet. The smaller satellites transmit data back to earth, which is picked up by satellite dishes. Glitches became apparent with the original dish, so the Stanford 150-foot dish was used. The end result was successful Internet communication by an extremely small satellite.
In 2010, a graduate student of the University of Twente in the Netherlands, Marcel van de Burgwal, developed an integrated circuit chip to replace satellite dishes. Each chip picks up a little bit of information, and a multitude of chips are connected together to form the entire receiving antenna. Because of this discovery, a wall or roof of a building can be a receiving antenna, instead of having an unsightly dish bolted onto the side of a house.