Breakthrough On Google Loon!

A discovery that may lift spirits and spark the next stage of Project Loon

In the world we live in today, innovation and invention is the mantra of many, many companies. Technology and resources have never been as supportive of growth and development as they are been in the last five years.

Yet only a few of these companies have the risk appetite for moonshots. Simply because moonshots by the very definition, are long term expeditions into the unknown and hence need to be well supported and financed. Not only do the explorers need to have the pockets to survive the long journeys of discovery, they also need to to sustain and remain positive.

One of the projects that has gained the most fandom (and is thankfully not being pillaged by any one) is one of Google’s most ambitious projects — Project Loon.

Google, one of those select few companies that embarks on moonshots that aim to change the way the world works. Project Loon is one of these projects, which is aimed at bringing internet connectivity to far flung and “disconnected” via a bunch of flying balloons. Sounds cool, eh?

Well, cool it indeed is! And Google has just made a breakthrough on the project.

Google recently announced that thanks to advancements in machine learning software, it can now deploy fewer balloons to provide greater connectivity. The project is well into its fourth year of development and this breakthrough could well be the tailwind they were looking for, to twist the throttle and shorten the timeline for the formally launching the service globally.

“The reason this is so exciting is we can now run an experiment and try to give services in particular places of the world with 10 or 20 or 30 balloons, not with 200 or 300 or 400 balloons”, said Astro Teller, the head of X, at a press event. The Google Loon project is a part of X, which is run by Google’s parent company Alphabet.

“We’ve actually made so much progress that we think our timeline for when we can provide useful internet service to people is much, much sooner”, added Sal Candido, an engineer on the Loon project.

Well, one good news is that Loon has at least been out of the lab, and abundantly at that. A bunch of their testing units have been in floating around over South America.
Last September, X had shared a story of a 98-day flight over Peru, and soon after Loon was spotted over Yellow Stone National Park.

One of the problems that the project was facing was with respect to the positioning of the balloons.
The original idea was that the balloons would just float around the globe, giving off internet connectivity. But tests eventually proved that that approach did not make much sense. So a revised strategy decreed that the balloons would be concentrated on areas that suffered connectivity issues.

It was with this, that debilitating problems arose.

The first problem was to find a way to keep the balloons a safe traveling distance apart. The second was to replace a balloon that drifted from an area that needed connectivity.

Amongst the new developments, the team now believes that they have found solutions to these, and devised methods of keeping the balloons in more concentrated areas. Thanks to improved altitude control and navigation systems, the balloons will now make small loops over a land mass, instead of circumnavigating the whole planet as was the plan originally.

“Project Loon’s algorithms can now send small teams of balloons to form a cluster over a specific region where people need internet access”, the company stated. “This is a shift from our original model for Loon in which we planned to create rings of balloons sailing around the globe, and balloons would take turns moving through a region to provide service”.

“We’ll reduce the number of balloons we need and get greater value out of each one”, the company said in the post. “All of this helps reduce the costs of operating a Loon-powered network, which is good news for the telco partners we’ll work with around the world to make Loon a reality, and critical given that cost has been one key factor keeping reliable internet from people living in rural and remote regions”.

However, what remains to now be seen is the practicality of it all, and the actual performance numbers, when it comes to the investment required.
The question of whether the balloons will be cheaper than building infrastructure in remote areas that lack connectivity is yet to be answered.

Also, one must take into consideration that telecom providers do not usually lay cable in disconnected areas because there isn’t an abundance of subscribers there, which makes the project unprofitable for them. Will Google’s intentions be similar, and if not, then with what intention will Google go ahead with the project?

They haven’t been pumping money into this for years no end without any expectations. Generous, Google has always been; and they usually attack problems because they often are the only ones with the resources and the small approval protocol (no Appropriations processes, no politicians to convince, no budgets to get sanctioned) to be able to pull it off in a shortish timeframe; but generosity comes when there’s viability and need. I doubt that Google’s doing this with a view to profit from it financially. I think it’s more an expedition to empower the human race, because they, Google are in a position to. That said, they’ll definitely have an end game in mind, as must Facebook with it’s own internet-via-solar-powered-drone project called Aquila.

All this is exciting, with one proviso — Net Neutrality be upheld.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.