Inside Google’s Project Loon — giving every cell phone direct access to the Internet

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With the potential to bypass telcos and government censors. It will be fascinating to see how the fly-over rights negotiations go for China and countries that want to control the connections to their people, for political or business reasons.

Google can easily avoid the Northern Hemisphere altogether to start. They hope to have all major cities in the Southern Hemisphere covered 90% of the time later this year. They have 7 balloon up currently, but have had as many as 70 up at one time. The ultimate global solution is 10’s of thousands.

The only navigation control is vertical (adding or removing air as ballast; the helium remains in a separate part of the balloon) so they can catch or avoid the prevailing winds.

Here you see some of the engineering team. I am rooting for them to help democratize access across the planet, and offer a competitive alternative to the limited broadband choices in many parts of the world today.

3 responses to “Inside Google’s Project Loon — giving every cell phone direct access to the Internet”

jurvetson

Mar 4, 2015 at 6:54 pm

This is the payload section, photo build two. It hangs below the balloon. The styrofoam case keeps the heat in (they have to run heaters internally to keep it warm enough; I joked that they could just return to Intel processors). Left front corner is Iridium antenna; back right is GPS. They communicate directly to handsets by LTE. The brick at the bottom is the battery. They do not deep discharge (yet) by running the service only during the daytime when the solar cells are operating. You can click on each photo for full size
This is the portion that controls altitude. There is a custom dual-blade (times 8) impeller in the center that pushes air into an internal bladder in the balloon to add or remove ballast (the air weight under pressure). There are five silver solenoids around it in a ring that open or seal five valves in the ring (so they can hold a given pressure, and altitude, without using power. For now, it is binary – all 5 are fully open or fully closed)
When they want to bring a Loon down, they fire squibs to filet the balloon open at the top. The helium is lost, and it will free fall. So they deploy a parachute as well:

And here is a recent interview with the Project Lead, Mike Cassidy, on The Verge.

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thepretenda

Mar 5, 2015 at 10:43 am

People in Parramatta, NSW, Australia thought they saw a UFO last year…until people suspected that what they saw might have been a Google Loom balloon being tested…

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gordontour

May 2, 2015 at 7:29 am

Thanks for sharing.
Its great to see innovation and development.

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Inside Google’s Project Loon — giving every cell phone direct access to the Internet

3 responses to “Inside Google’s Project Loon — giving every cell phone direct access to the Internet”

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