Facebook drones. Google Says It Can Now Launch Up To 20 Project Loon Balloons Per Day. Google’s Project Loon, the company’s effort to deliver Internet access from balloons that travel around the world in the stratosphere, continues to make strides toward a commercial launch. A few days ago we heard that Google will launch a test with Australia’s largest telco provider Telstra next month and today, Google released a bit more info about the state of the project. Its balloons, for example, can now stay in the air up to 10 times longer than when the project started last year. Many now last over 100 days — and some even up to 130 days. In total, the balloons have now flown over three million kilometers (though this one, which apparently crashed in Africa a few days ago, probably didn’t make it quite as far).
Google also says that it has gotten much better at steering its balloons. “ By constantly computing thousands of trajectory simulations it turns out we can get pretty close to our targets,” the Loon team writes on Google+ today. Project Loon: How Google’s Internet balloons are actually working. Photo by Jon Shenk/Google The majority of people in the world lack access to the Internet. Either they can’t afford a connection, or none exists where they live. Of all the efforts to bring those people online, Google’s “Project Loon” sounds like the most far-fetched. At the secretive Google X labs, it’s a moonshot among moonshots. Will Oremus is Slate's senior technology writer. But it just might be working. When the search company announced in June 2013 that it was building “Wi-Fi balloons” to blanket the world’s poor, remote, and rural regions with Internet beamed down from the skies, expert reaction ranged from skeptical to dismissive—with good reason.
“Absolutely impossible,” declared Per Lindstrand, a Swedish aeronautical engineer and perhaps the world’s best-known balloonist, in an early Wired article about the project. “When I first started on this project, I would have said, like, 5 percent,” Cassidy says. “We knew it was hard to make a super-pressure balloon,” Cassidy recalls. Google’s Balloon Internet Experiment, One Year Later | Business. A Loon balloon ascends to the stratosphere and heads toward Google’s partner school, Linoca Gayoso Castelo Branco, where students wait for the arrival of the Internet. Photo: Courtesy of Google Earlier this month, Mike Cassidy, a project director at Google’s high-risk research division X, woke before dawn in the Northwest Brazilian state of Piauí.
It was already warm and humid. He drove for an hour to a clearing in a rural area and helped his team launch several high-altitude balloons with a payload of Internet connectivity technology—the nub of the project he directs called Loon. Then he jumped into another car to race against the balloons’ flight path, speeding along an unpaved road, dodging chickens and pigs, and finally arriving at Agua Fria, a tiny community on the outskirts of the town Campo Maior.
Cassidy pulled up to a rural schoolhouse that had never been able to receive high-quality Internet signals. Google bumped up flight durations by extensively analyzing its failures. African Entrepreneurs Deflate Google’s Internet Balloon Idea. Google’s latest pet project, called Loon, is meant to deliver the Internet to new parts of the world via solar-powered balloons soaring through the stratosphere. Yet some technologists in Africa say the project may be unrealistic as a competitive networking solution for their continent. For one thing, the service would only provide 3G connectivity, meaning that it would need to compete with cellular networks that are expanding and becoming ever cheaper to use. “In Kenya, most parts of the country have 3G access,” says Phares Kariuki, previously a technology consultant to the World Bank, who now leads an effort to build a supercomputing cluster at iHub, the tech startup space in Nairobi. And even if Google managed to deliver faster speeds from future balloon fleets, they’d be solving the wrong problem, Kariuki adds: “The barrier to Internet adoption is not so much the lack of connectivity.
It’s the high cost of the equipment.” The idea comes with practical problems. Google's Project Loon to float the internet on balloons - tech - 18 June 2013. Twenty kilometres up, slung under balloons from the same company that helped Felix Baumgartner jump from the edge of space last year, a payload of solar panels and wireless antennas is helping Google's Project Loon bring wireless internet access to the most remote parts of the world. The ultimate goal is to connect the two-thirds of the world's population that currently has no internet access. Currently being trialled in New Zealand, each balloon delivers a coverage area of 1250 square kilometres as it floats overhead.
New Zealanders who want to access the service must have a special antenna fitted to their house that connects to the closest balloon. The signal is then bounced from balloon to balloon, until it joins the internet back on the ground. Solar panels power the balloons' antennas and communications equipment, storing energy in batteries to keep them working through the night. Basic bottlenecks Kooky stuff Flight time is another issue. More From New Scientist Promoted Stories. Exclusive: How Google Will Use Balloons to Deliver Internet to the Hinterlands. Project Loon sails through the stratosphere, where there are different wind layers. Using wind data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the balloons are maneuvered by identifying the wind layer with the desired speed and direction and then adjusting altitude to float in that layer.
Photo: Jon Shenk The Project Loon team prepared for launch in the pre-dawn frost near Lake Tekapo, New Zealand. Solar panels and insulated electronics packages, prepared for launch. It takes 4 hours for the solar panels to charge the battery during the day, and that power is sufficient to keep all the flight systems working 24 hours a day. A fully-inflated balloon envelope at Moffett Field, California. Bill Rogers inflates the balloon envelope with helium. Project Loon sails through the stratosphere, where there are different wind layers.
Not much happens in Geraldine, a small farming community in the interior of the South Island of New Zealand, about 85 miles from Christchurch. Google to Spend a Billion or More on Internet Satellites. Internet access is common in the developed world, but many in emerging markets are just now getting online. For Google, one of the most visited sites in the world, it’s a massive growth opportunity. And they aren’t going to wait for local governments or anyone else to build the necessary infrastructure. The Wall Street Journal recently reported the firm plans to spend $1 to $3 billion to launch a fleet of internet satellites. The satellite network would initially include 180 small satellites and might later double that number. The project is part of Google’s wider plan to provide internet access to remote areas using solar powered drones and high altitude balloons. They recently purchased drone company Titan Aerospace and launched Project Loon to experiment with a squadron of stratospheric, internet providing balloons steered by global trade winds.
Why is a software company so interested in building infrastructure? Consider the implications of the second half of that statement. Why Google and Facebook need balloons, drones and rockets. We tend to think that everybody's online these days. In fact, only one-third of the world's population has access to the Internet. The other two-thirds are simply beyond reach. Google and Facebook are hatching schemes (that some people call crazy) to bring to the majority of people what we in the privileged minority enjoy every day -- the ability to get online. It's really an extension of actions Google and Facebook already take to get people connected. Paying the bills Most people in the industrialized world are aware that Google and Facebook pay millions of people in the developing world to use their services.
In many parts of the world, people pay for data as they use it -- more usage, more cost. So Facebook came up with an idea: Why not pick up the check? Facebook Zero was announced in 2010 to bring people free data connectivity, at least while they're visiting Facebook. Facebook Zero's Web address is 0.facebook.com or zero.facebook.com. Google's offering is called Google Free Zone. Why flying 'Internet drones' over Africa is a dumb, libertarian fantasy. When I arrived in a West African newsroom last year to help with a journalism training initiative, one of the first things to come up was my BlackBerry Bold. Despite what the foolish #firstworldproblems hashtag on Twitter would have you believe, my phone was probably the most out of date there. Everyone else in this Ghanaian newsroom was using Android smartphones from Samsung and HTC. A few people had cheaper Nokia Asha smartphones. There were a couple of iPhones and when the Samsung S4 came out a few months later at least one popped up.
That’s not to say everyone had a smartphone, or that there wasn’t hardship. But mobile Internet connectivity – with the exception of our unstable WiFi – was not the issue. There were plenty of mobile carriers offering decent service: Vodafone, MTN, Glo, Airtel and Tigo. Let me be even more clear: The Internet already exists in Africa! Now, there are several things that strike me about this. Again, don’t get me wrong. Loon for All – Project Loon – Google.
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