I first discovered Loon through a photographer I follow who posted a snap of a balloon floating through the New Zealand skies. The image inspired a sense of wonder, awe — and possibility. I’d never seen anything like that in my 30+ years working in the telecom industry. The more I learned, the more I wanted to be part of the mission. This sense of excitement and possibility has stayed with me over the last four years as I had the privilege to lead Loon in our mission to expand connectivity around the world.
We talk a lot about connecting the next billion users, but the reality is Loon has been chasing the hardest problem of all in connectivity — the last billion users: The communities in areas too difficult or remote to reach, or the areas where delivering service with existing technologies is just too expensive for everyday people. While we’ve found a number of willing partners along the way, we haven’t found a way to get the costs low enough to build a long-term, sustainable business. Developing radical new technology is inherently risky, but that doesn’t make breaking this news any easier. Today, I’m sad to share that Loon will be winding down. …
It was 2013 when I first heard about a crazy idea baked up in the labs of Google X to send balloons into near space to connect people in internet-less blank spots around the world. Frankly, I didn’t think it would work. It seemed too crazy, even for a company with a reputation for making the outlandish possible.
Fast forward to today and a lot has happened. Balloons went from lasting hours to days to weeks to months to over half a year. Launching, once done by hand, is now done by twin, 90-foot tall automated machines that can send a balloon to 60,000 feet once every 30 minutes. Balloons that once floated freely around the world are now directed by machine-learning algorithms that have developed their own interesting and complex navigational maneuvers to achieve the mission of providing sustained service to users below. Communications equipment that could have once been made in a college dorm room (literally: beer coolers and WiFi routers were used in the early days) now deliver a coverage footprint of over 11,000 square kilometers — a whopping 200x that of an average cell tower. And a company that began building a commercial business just two years ago now has contracts to serve on multiple continents, partnerships with some of the largest mobile network operators in the world, is leading the commercial exploration and development of the stratosphere, and is helping the global aviation community develop the next generation of high-altitude operations, regulations, and policy. …
With Loon’s deployment of balloon-powered internet already underway in Kenya, I’m incredibly excited to announce that we’re expanding our footprint in Africa. Loon and Vodacom have signed a commercial contract to begin serving the Cabo Delgado and Niassa provinces of Mozambique, two regions that have proven hard to cover in the past due to their vast and logistically challenging geographies.
We’re extremely pleased to be partnering with Vodacom, one of Africa’s largest mobile network operators. Vodacom has a big footprint in southern Africa, and provides service to tens of millions of people across multiple countries every single day. …
Loon can be incredibly effective in times of crisis or disaster. Because even in a place that has good mobile network coverage, people who were served can quickly become unserved for significant periods of time when a disaster hits. Loon’s unique ability to provide resilient and flexible service makes our solution an important and powerful tool in such scenarios.
The problem with disasters, however, is that they are unpredictable by nature. Despite our best efforts, we can’t know when or where the hurricane or earthquake may hit. …
The Kenyan government has given formal approval for Loon’s balloons to operate in the stratosphere above the country. This is a critical step in our efforts to provide service in Kenya on a sustained basis, and we’re grateful to our partner, Telkom Kenya, and the Kenyan government for their support.
In the immediate term, this means that we will begin dispatching existing airborne balloons, as well as preparing new ones to launch from our launch sites in the United States, and navigating them to Kenya on the stratospheric winds 20km above Earth. This process takes time, and we expect it to be a number of weeks before Loon’s balloons arrive in Kenya. Once there, we will conduct the final stages of network integration testing with Telkom Kenya. …
Over the past few months, we have been in negotiations with Telefónica on a commercial contract that would utilize Loon’s balloons to extend mobile internet access to unserved and underserved areas of Peru, specifically remote parts of the Amazon region. In the past month, these efforts had accelerated to the point where we had begun installing infrastructure and intermittently testing with balloons serving LTE over the region. The progress was very encouraging.
On Sunday morning, a magnitude 8.0 earthquake struck the region. After requests from the government of Peru and Telefónica, we quickly re-directed a group of balloons to the impacted area. Early Tuesday morning, the first balloons arrived and began serving LTE to users below. …
Loon began as a simple idea to bring the internet to those who don’t have it. Of course that’s not a simple problem, which is how we ended up with stratospheric internet balloons.
In the early days of Loon, the focus was on the technology. After years of trying to prove that Loon would not work, we were pleased to conclude that indeed it could work. The next question was how to get this technology to people who actually need it.
We quickly realized that as a business with the mission of connecting people everywhere, our path to success is to partner with those who have significant experience connecting people every day. Mobile network operators (MNOs) have decades of experience delivering connectivity to billions of users around the world. With Loon’s technology, we see a valuable opportunity to help MNOs reach more people in areas that have been difficult or impossible to serve. Loon is as an infrastructure solution that will allow MNOs to expand their networks and attract new customers. …
I’ve spent 30 years working in the telecom industry, but it was my interest in photography that first introduced me to Project Loon. In 2013, a photographer I follow posted the first images of balloon-powered internet connecting a sheep farmer in New Zealand. These extraordinary images of jellyfish-like balloons, gliding past snow-capped mountains captured my imagination. It was a world away from the infrastructure I had spent my life using to connect people, and the idea seemed at least a little crazy.
Some UFO sightings and more than 30 million kilometers flown in the stratosphere later, and my initial skepticism has been proven wrong. As Loon showed last year, strapping a re-engineered cell tower to the bottom of a balloon and floating it 20 kilometers in the sky to provide connectivity to those below is far from crazy — it’s an idea whose time has come. …
Last month, Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico as a Category 4 hurricane and caused significant damage to the island’s connectivity infrastructure. In the weeks following this disaster, the Project Loon team has been working with the Government of Puerto Rico, the FCC, the FAA, FEMA, spectrum partners and international aviation authorities to bring balloon powered internet to the island to help. Thanks to their support, we are now collaborating with AT&T and T-Mobile to deliver emergency internet service to the hardest hit parts of the island.
Working with AT&T and T-Mobile, Project Loon is now supporting basic communication and internet activities like sending text messages and accessing information online for some people with LTE enabled phones. This is the first time we have used our new machine learning powered algorithms to keep balloons clustered over Puerto Rico, so we’re still learning how best to do this. As we get more familiar with the constantly shifting winds in this region, we hope to keep the balloons over areas where connectivity is needed for as long as possible. …
For the last few months, Peru has been battered by extreme rains and flooding. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced and the Peruvian government has declared more than 800 provinces to be in a state of emergency. In situations like these, the ability to communicate with loved ones and access basic information becomes paramount — yet communications infrastructure on the ground is often one of the first things to be knocked out by natural disasters like floods and landslides.
Loon balloons float 20 km up in the stratosphere and so have the potential to extend connectivity to where it’s needed regardless of what’s happening below. We’ve been flying balloons over Latin America and running connectivity tests with our telecommunications partner Telefonica in Peru for the last few months. So when we saw what was happening, we reached out to Telefonica and the government to see how we could help. …
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