Loon’s bubble bursts – Alphabet closes internet balloon company

When Google announced ‘Project Loon’ in 2013, a running joke behind the project was that no one thought a network of flying internet balloons was a viable idea. Eight years later, Google decided that a network of flying internet balloons was indeed not a viable idea. Loon announced he was going to stand still, citing the lack of a ‘long-term, sustainable business’.

Loon CEO (Loon was eventually singled out in an Alphabet company) Alastair Westgarth writes:

We talk a lot about linking the following billion users, but the reality is that Loon is chasing the most difficult problem of all in connectivity – the last billion users: the communities in areas that are too difficult or remote to reach, or the areas where service delivery with existing technologies is just too expensive for everyday people. Although we have found a number of willing partners along the way, we have not yet found a way to get the cost low to build a long-term sustainable business. The development of radical new technology is inherently risky, but it does not make it any easier to break this news. Today I am sad to share that Loon is going to take off.

Google also mentioned economic problems when Titan Aerospace closed in 2017, a plan to deliver the Internet via drone.

The name “Loon” comes in part from the fact that the project uses flying balloons as a kind of satellite with an ultra-low orbit, but also from how ‘loon’ the idea sounded to everyone outside the project. Google’s introductory blog post outlined the idea of ​​a flying internet balloon network and followed it up by saying, ‘The idea may sound a little crazy – and that’s part of why we call it Project Loon – but there is solid science behind it. “

It seems that science mostly works out. Wage’s selling point was that about half the world was not on the internet. The areas that are offline are too remote, without enough repairs to build a traditional internet infrastructure. So let’s build everything here and fly there, and then everyone can use our flying internet infrastructure in the air. The Loon balloons flew cell phone towers – they could deliver an LTE signal to ordinary smartphones (the cheapest computers we have) without special equipment for the end user. There was also a home version of Loon with a cute red balloon antenna. Google wanted to integrate Loon balloons into the traditional mobile network and had partnerships with AT&T, Telkom Kenya and Telefonica in Peru.

Each flying tower was a polyethylene helium balloon with a tennis court, with a height control system, solar panels, a satellite link for Google’s air traffic control and all the tower pieces. The balloons fly about 20 km above the earth – much lower than a low-orbit satellite – and form a mesh network between them. The mesh network will need to be wide enough to cover the offline area, and also wide enough to radiate to the traditional internet and bring the entire network online. Loon had no directional control and rather relied on different wind directions at different heights. At the height of the project, Google launched 250 balloons a year, and they could stay afloat for 300 days before being recycled. I do not think Google ever published an uptime statistic, but Loon did use it. At one point, Loon provided connections to 200,000 people in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria knocked out the rural infrastructure. A Commercial Wage Service was launched in Kenya in 2020.

It sounds like the problem with Loon was that it was such a unique solution with a lot of special equipment, and if you target people on the other side of the digital divide with little purchasing power, they obviously can not afford to pay for all the hardware only. In this respect, a project like SpaceX’s Starlink seems better suited to bridge the digital divide. Starlink makes the rich, developed world pay for the infrastructure, and then SpaceX can subsidize access for developing countries. Wage would certainly have been more convenient, as it was a flying cell phone tower with a signal radiating directly to your smartphone (Starlink needs a pizza box-sized antenna), but if you’re talking about no way to get the internet at all, the more scalable solution seems better.

Some of Loon’s technology will survive another Alphabet Internet Access Project, Project Taara, aimed at delivering the Internet via a giant laser beam. Google’s wild experiments never end, do they?