Google Details New Project Loon Tech to Keep Its Internet Balloons Afloat

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At Google's annual I/O developer conference, the company didn't spend much time discussing one of its most ambitious initiatives: Project Loon, Google's effort to beam broadband Internet access down to remote or rural regions of the globe from a network of stratosphere-roaming balloons. Loon was started inside the company's Google X lab in 2011 and has accompanied other high-flying efforts, such as one to fly solar-powered drones transmitting wireless Internet signals. But Loon has come a long way in the past two years, and Mike Cassidy, a vice president at Google and the project's leader, gave Bloomberg an update. He highlights two recent advancements that could help Project Loon finally reach commercial deployment as soon as 2016.

First, Cassidy says Google has partially automated the balloon launching process with 50-foot-tall, cube-shaped units it calls the Autolauncher. The second advancement within Project Loon is an even bigger deal. Cassidy says they have devised a way to pass high-frequency Internet signals from balloon to balloon in midair, which allows individual balloons to roam 400 kilometers to 800 kilometers away from a ground station. By the end of the year, Cassidy hopes to be able to provide a few days of continuous service in its tests.


Google Details New Project Loon Tech to Keep Its Internet Balloons Afloat