(Bal)Loon or Looney?

It’s hard to imagine, but there are still large chunks of mankind that don’t have access to high speed connectivity even in the Western world, not just parts of Africa and Asia. Of the world’s population of 7 billion, only 2.7 billion are wired.

Obviously, the company that benefits the most when more and more people get online is Google. No wonder then that it is Google that wants to create systems to allow anyone, anywhere to get connected…after all, smartphones are getting cheaper and cheaper. With cellphones, we bypassed laying cables as the way to provide connectivity. And now Google decided to bypass transmission towers (well, ok, they didn’t eliminate transmission towers altogether) by putting up balloons in the sky! Project Loon as it is called, aims at putting a ring of balloons around the globe that act as your wireless network. Plus, of course, a few ground stations to close the loop. And they also install special antennas in those remote areas that they seek to connect.

Another one of Google’s moonshots (“so-crazy-they-just-might-work ideas”, as Wired calls them), the balloons fly at heights of 60,000 feet (jet liners fly at 33,000 feet). But how do you keep a balloon at a fixed point? Fighting the wind would require huge amounts of energy, so they decided that if the balloon needed to go in a particular direction, it would adjust its altitude to “find” winds that were flowing that way and then let the wind carry it. How do you “find” winds? Turns out there is plenty of data on winds, past and present with the US government. And who is better at data crunching than Google?

All this required hiring new categories of experts, including aerospace engineers and military veterans (to launch and retrieve balloons that went down in tough to access areas)! The balloons have GPS sensors to help locate them. And since Google loves data of any kind, they put all kinds of sensors on the balloons to get 189 types of data (including pressure and temperature)! What will they do with all that data? They’ll find some use for it, I’m sure. They always do.

But balloons are notoriously difficult to manage at high altitudes. Which raises the question of reliability of any such wireless service, right? Google isn’t shying away from the problem. As one of their balloon experts said:
“Google is putting more resources behind this than any group in the history of ballooning, private or government.”

Formally launched in New Zealand a few months back, it’s time now to wait and watch to know if it’s all just hot air or if it catches on.

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