Alphabet is shutting down Loon, its attempt to deliver internet service via balloons, according to Loon’s CEO.
Loon began in 2011, as an unofficial Google X incubation project, before becoming an official project in 2013. The company’s goal was to use balloons in place of cell towers, to provide internet access to underserved areas. The concept was especially appealing in areas where building cell towers would otherwise be difficult, dangerous or impossible.
The company struck a deal to provide service in Kenya, and was used in disaster zones to help keep people connected, such as in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Despite its success, however, Alphabet is pulling the plug.
CEO Alastair Westgarth broke the news in a blog post:
While we’ve found a number of willing partners along the way, we haven’t found a way to get the costs low enough to build a long-term, sustainable business. Developing radical new technology is inherently risky, but that doesn’t make breaking this news any easier. Today, I’m sad to share that Loon will be winding down.
Loon was definitely one of the stranger projects to come out of Google and Alphabet and it’s a shame to see it shutting down.
Alphabet subsidiary Loon, along with a coalition of companies, has formed the HAPS Alliance to help promote high-altitude internet.
Loon was founded with the goal of providing internet access to under-served communities, using high-altitude balloons to deliver it. With today’s announcement, SoftBank’s HAPSMobile, AeroVironment, Airbus Defence and Space, Bharti Airtel Limited, China Telecom Corporation Limited, Deutsche Telekom AG, Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson, Intelsat US LLC, Nokia Corporation, SoftBank Corp. and Telefónica S.A. have joined with Loon to help further that goal.
The new Haps Alliance “is being created so member companies can collectively advocate for High Altitude Platform Station (HAPS) business development with the relevant authorities in various countries, build a cooperative HAPS ecosystem, develop common product specifications and promote the standardization of HAPS network interoperability. All of these activities will be key to the Alliance’s aim of addressing diverse social issues and creating new value by providing telecommunications network connectivity worldwide through the utilization of high altitude vehicles. The Alliance, originally an initiative from HAPSMobile and Loon, will have members from participating leading companies across the aerospace, technology and telecom industries to carry out the Alliance’s activities.”
This is good news for rural and under-served communities around the world and should help accelerate the deployment of high-altitude internet solutions.
A South African sheep farmer stumbled upon something odd recently – a crashed balloon filled with electronic components. Thinking it was a weather balloon, he did some investigating. What he found was that the balloon was actually made in the USA, and belonged to Google.
Urbanus Botha found a whole mess of plastic collapsed on his land, and with the help of his 20-year-old daughter he determined what the “Google X” imprint on the crashed balloon signified – by Googling it.
Botha didn’t know what to make of the balloon, especially since it contained several electronic components. His 20-year-old daughter, Sarita, was just as intrigued, and took photos of the balloon on her smartphone, sending them to her brothers John, 30, and Benny, 27. The brothers identified the words “Made in the USA” and “Google X” on the pictures, and so Googled “Google X” and balloons.
“We realized the balloon was part of the Google Loon Project,” Sarita said.
So I guess Botha and Sarita were not using Google’s internet.
We first learned about Project Loon (for balLOON or for LOONey, or maybe both) last summer. One of Google[x]‘s ‘moonshot’ ventures, Project Loon wants to increase internet access for underserved areas across the world by putting giant internet-providing balloons way up in the air – as in twice as high as commercial airplanes.
Earlier this year, Google announced that one of its Project Loon balloons had lapped the globe in 22 days, and the project as a whole has clocked over 500,000 km. Google’s grand plan is to have a “semipermanent ring of balloons hovering above the Southern Hemisphere by the end of next year or so.
So, Google’s Project Loon balloons are going to come down at some point – whether it be by accident of by design. Here’s a little bit on how Google goes about recovering its balloons.
This past summer, a crashed Project Loon balloon confused New Zealanders, who dispatched emergency response (including a helicopter) to deal with a reported plane crash.
This year’s 87thMacy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade may not feature its biggest attraction due to inclement weather. A mix of sleet, rain, snow and strong winds could prevent some of this years balloons from appearing in the parade
16 inflatable parade characters such as Spiderman, Snoopy, Spongebob Squarepants, and Kermit the frog could lose their flying privileges due to New York City regulations. The city rules that the much loved balloons won’t be able to fly if winds exceed 23 mph or if the gusts exceed 34 mph. The latest weather forecast by The National Weather Service indicates that winds are likely to range between 15-25 mph while the gusts are expected to exceed 35 mph. The authorities will make final decision on Thursday morning.
“The balloons, as you know, can be flown to various heights… or not brought out at all,” New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said on Tuesday.
“These are decisions that will be made as we go forward depending on the weather conditions,” Kelly said.
The restriction is meant to protect the crowd because heavy winds cause a flight risk for oversized balloons. With the tallest balloon reaching over 5 stories high, it could mean that the handlers would have difficulty trying to control the balloons. The Macy’s parade is America’s most watched parade of the year. People come from all over the world to see the spectacle and take part in the celebration. If the balloons don’t fly this year it will surely leave many people heart broken – especially the kids. Let’s hope the weather holds up.
As you may have heard by now, Google is sending balloons up into the air in an effort to make fast Internet available to everyone in the world. The plan is to have balloons up twice the altitude of where commercial planes fly, all around the Earth. This is the latest “moonshot” project out of Google[x], the experimental branch of the company responsible for such noteworthy projects as Google Glass and self-driving cars.
Google has already launched balloons in New Zealand as part of its initial pilot test, which includes 50 users. Here, you can see some video from the launch.
Google has also made available a series of photos from the launch on the outskirts of Christchurch. Project Loon shared them on Google+, and they’re quite beautifully shot.
Google plans to expand the pilot across other areas that share the same latitude with New Zealand. It seems like the project is going pretty well so far, so we’ll see how far Google can really take this.
More on Project Loon and the technology behind it here.
We’ve seen Google accomplish some pretty remarkable things when the company puts its collective mind to it. In recent years, Google has really been pushing the envelope with its so called “moonshots” like Google Glass and self-driving cars.
Google has now announced its latest in the moonshot series out of Google[x]. It’s called “Project Loon” because the idea is so crazy. They’re sending up balloons around the world to increase Internet access for all, including rural, remote and underserved areas. Many of us take Internet for granted, but as the company notes, it’s still unaffordable for two out of every three people on the planet.
“There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity—jungles, archipelagos, mountains,” writes project lead Mike Cassidy in post on the Google blog. “There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month’s income.”
The plan is to build a ring of balloons flying around the earth in altitudes twice as high as those traveled by commercial planes. Google has already built a system to do this, which uses complex algorithms, and “lots of computing power”. The balloons beam Internet access to people on the ground, and the company says speeds are similar to those of 3G networks, or even faster.
“Balloons, with all their effortless elegance, present some challenges,” writes Cassidy. “Many projects have looked at high-altitude platforms to provide Internet access to fixed areas on the ground, but trying to stay in one place like this requires a system with major cost and complexity. So the idea we pursued was based on freeing the balloons and letting them sail freely on the winds. All we had to do was figure out how to control their path through the sky. We’ve now found a way to do that, using just wind and solar power: we can move the balloons up or down to catch the winds we want them to travel in. That solution then led us to a new problem: how to manage a fleet of balloons sailing around the world so that each balloon is in the area you want it right when you need it.”
That’s where all that computing power and those complex algorithms come in.
Is this just crazy enough to work?
Well, as you can see (if you watched the videos) they’re already getting the ball rolling. Google has already started a pilot program in New Zealand with 50 users trying to test connection with the balloons. They launched 30 balloons last week. Google says it will look to find partners at the same latitude as New Zealand over time as it expands the pilot.
A NASA balloon has broken the record for longest flight. The balloon, which carries the Super Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder (Super-TIGER), spent 55 days, 1 hour, and 34 minutes circling the South Pole at 127,000 feet – over four times the altitude of commercial airplanes. The previous record for a balloon of that size was 46 days.
The record-breaking balloon also broke the record for longest flight of a heavy-lift scientific balloon, beating the previous record (set by NASA’s Super Pressure Balloon in 2009) by five minutes.
“This is an outstanding achievement for NASA’s Astrophysics balloon team,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. “Keeping these huge balloons aloft for such long periods lets us do forefront science that would be difficult to do otherwise.”
The balloon was held aloft by wind patterns at the South pole. Anticyclonic winds that circulate from east to west in the stratosphere there enable long-duration balloon flights.
The Super-TIGER instrument aboard the balloon measured rare elements heavier than iron in the cosmic rays that constantly strike the Earth’s atmosphere. The data will be used to research the origins of the particles and how they reach their high energy states. Researchers estimate the device detected 50 million cosmic rays, and that the data will take around two years to fully analyze.
“This has been a very successful flight because of the long duration, which allowed us to detect large numbers of cosmic rays,” said Bob Binns, principal investigator of the Super-TIGER mission. “The instrument functioned very well.”
