Project Loon, the once seemingly crazy idea of floating giants balloons into the stratosphere to provide Internet access to remote areas, is coming to the United States.
Not right away, but Project Loon head Mike Cassidy said Monday that
The U.S. isn't next on the list for Loon coverage, if only because all but about 10 million people here have Internet access--though Cassidy noted that "even in my house, I don't have a cell signal."
Google's chief goal for Loon remains to provide access to much more underserved areas of the world such as Africa, where only 10% of people have Internet access, and Brazil, where kids often climb high in trees with cell phones to get a better signal. Overall, most 4 billion people worldwide have no Internet access and most of them don't even have the capability to get it because there's absolutely no coverage.
Loon can help solve that problem, Cassidy said, because a balloon 60,000 up in the stratosphere can provide Internet coverage to 5,000 square kilometers, the size of Rhode Island, far more cost-effectively than cell towers on the ground.
Google is aiming to make them even more cost-effective by having balloons communicate with each other, beaming signals via radio frequency using precisely aimed gimbals--something Loon is still experimenting with. But if Google can make it work, a series of balloons could cover 800 kilometers between necessary ground stations, 10 times as much as currently.
The project, conceived in Google's "moonshot factory" Google X, has had to make a number of breakthroughs. For one, it has relied on a fairly elegant way to move the balloons. "Our approach was instead of fighting the wind, we work with the wind," he said. Because strata of wind currents go in opposite directions in the stratosphere, Google simply needs to move the balloons up or down to catch winds going left or right. Small fans pump air into a small balloon inside the big helium balloon to make it go down, since air is heavier than helium.
Google also had to make breakthroughs in balloon science. It wanted them to last 100 days, but the first 60 balloons popped almost immediately upon reaching altitude. "Then we solved that one, but they leaked," he said. Partner Raven Aerostar, which makes balloons for
Closer to home for Google, it also made advances in computer science, working out ways to determine wind speed and direction at every point they steered the balloons around. Seven of last eight flights in the Southern Hemisphere came within 500 meters of a target after flying 10,000 kilometers, Cassidy said.
Google had to improve launch procedures as well, coming up with a huge building-sized "Birdhouse" that allows balloon to be launched in 15 mile-per-hour winds. Not least, the company has negotiated landing zones around the world with governments, both to prevent accidents and to retrieve payloads for reuse.
Interestingly, when asked about whether drones, which Facebook and Google itself also are exploring for large-scale remote Internet access, Cassidy replied that while balloons may not be the only way to do that, they are proving "very cost-effective.
