Not yet done with innovation, Google has introduced its
latest in shelf project known as Project Loon, a balloon-powered Internet
access expected to offer access to yet underserved and unserved part of the
world.
Project Lead
for Project
Loon at Google Africa, Mike Cassidy, confirmed this to DigitalSENSEBusiness News at the weekend in a blog post and said they are looking onward
and upward.
According to him, the Internet is one of the most
transformative technologies of this era, but for 2 out of every 3 people on
earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this
is far from being a solved problem.
He pointed out that there are many terrestrial challenges
to Internet connectivity, namely jungles, archipelagos, and mountains in
addition to 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,” he said.
Cassidy added that solving these problems may not be simply
a question of time, because it requires looking at the problem of access from
new angles. So today we’re unveiling our latest moon shot from Google[x]:
balloon-powered Internet access.
He said that Google believes that it might actually be
possible to build a ring of balloons, flying around the globe on the
stratospheric winds, which provide Internet access to the earth below.
“It’s very early days, but we’ve built a system that uses
balloons, carried by the wind at altitudes twice as high as commercial planes,
to beam Internet access to the ground at speeds similar to today’s 3G networks
or faster. As a result, we hope balloons could become an option for connecting
rural, remote, and underserved areas and for helping with communications after
natural disasters. The idea may sound a bit crazy—and that’s part of the reason
we’re calling it Project Loon—but there’s solid science behind it,” he explained.
Balloons, he further said, with all their effortless
elegance, present some challenges, emphasizing that 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. We’re solving
this with some complex algorithms and lots of computing power,” he revealed.
Equally, Cassidy disclosed that now Google needs some
help via this experiment which is going to take way more than its team alone.
In the coming week, he said, Google would start a pilot
programme in the Canterbury area of New Zealand with 50 testers trying to connect
to the balloons.
“This is the first time we’ve launched this many balloons
(30 this week, in fact) and tried to connect to this many receivers on the
ground, and we’re going to learn a lot that will help us improve our technology
and balloon design,” he said.
Cassidy went on to add that over time, Google would like
to set up pilots in countries at the same latitude as New Zealand.
“We also want to find partners for the next phase of our
project—we can’t wait to hear feedback and ideas from people who’ve been
working for far longer than we have on this enormous problem of providing
Internet access to rural and remote areas. We imagine someday you'll be able to
use your cell phone with your existing service provider to connect to the balloons
and get connectivity where there is none today,” he said.
Maintaining that in the main time, this project is still
highly experimental technology and Google has a long way to go and therefore
solicits support as they keep trying and keep flying!
Remmy Nweke/DigitalSENSEBusiness News
... Making SENSE of digital revolution!
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