As we reported recently, Google is working on an ambitious project titled aptly titled “Project Loon” for its reliance on high altitude balloons and no small amount of crazy. The simple but lofty purpose of Project Loon is to deliver a minimum of 3G-speed internet to the entire world – starting with New Zealand.
The balloons themselves are around 15m in diameter and can carry up to a 10kg payload of antennas, navigation equipment, computers and batteries. They will sit at an altitude of 20km, placing them in the stratosphere well above any commercial traffic and below satellite range.
This altitude is part of how Google plans to steer the meandering travellers, relying on the generally singular-directional layers of wind that dominate the way-up there. By simply increasing and decreasing height, a balloon can ride the wind to its destination and even be directed to land in specific drop-off locations when it requires recycling or refitting. The batteries are solar-powered, adding to the overall green-theme of the project.
Tests of Project Loon are underway in New Zealand and will spread to Tasmania, Australia in mid-2014.
The aim is to produce a continuously moving ring of balloons around the globe, using the west-to-east winds in the stratosphere as a free conveyer belt.
Loon antics
In a video outlining the project, Rich Devaul, Chief Technical Architect for Project Loon, explained that the system will “communicate with specialised internet antennas on the ground. [An] antenna points up at the sky and talks to [a] balloon and each one of these balloons talks to their neighbouring balloons and then back down to the ground station which is connected to the local internet provider.”
Devaul also stated that the team has “designed our radios and antennas specifically to receive signals from Project Loon only… If we didn’t filter out the other signals the technology just wouldn’t work.”
Unlike Google’s blimp project in Africa, Loon looks to be a way to extend the range of pre-existing mobile broadband providers. This explains why the tests are starting in countries like NZ and Australia, rather than in more remote nations where internet access is even more limited or non-existent. Google is essentially building wireless broadband towers in the sky, rather than actually providing its own brand of wireless internet.
