Loon’s bubble bursts – Alphabet closes Internet balloon company

When Google announced “Project Loon” in 2013, a current joke behind the project was that no one thought that a network of flying Internet balloons was a viable idea. Eight years later, Google decided that a network of flying Internet balloons is not really a viable idea. Loon announced that it is closing, citing the lack of a “long-term sustainable business”.

Loon’s CEO (Loon eventually became an Alphabet company) Alastair Westgarth wrote:

We talked a lot about connecting the Next billions of users, but the reality is that Loon has been chasing the most difficult connectivity problem of all – the last billions of users: communities in very difficult or remote areas to reach, or areas where providing services with existing technologies is very expensive for ordinary people. Although we have found several willing partners along the way, we have not found a way to cut costs enough to build a long-term sustainable business. The development of new radical technology is inherently risky, but that does not make it easier to spread the word. Today, I am sad to share that Loon will be running out of breath.

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

The name “Loon” came partly from the fact that the project uses flying balloons as a kind of ultra-low orbit satellite, but also from how the idea sounded “crazy” to everyone outside the project. The introductory blog post from Google explained the idea of ​​a flying balloon network from the Internet and went on to say, “The idea may seem a little crazy – and that’s part of the reason we call it Project Loon – but there is a solid science behind it. “

Science seemed to work mainly. Loon’s selling point was that about half the world was not on the Internet. Offline areas are very remote, without enough backhaul 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 sky. Loon balloons were flying in cell phone towers – they could deliver an LTE signal to ordinary smartphones (the cheapest computers we have) without any special equipment for the end user. There was also a homemade version of Loon with a beautiful red balloon antenna. Google wanted to integrate Loon balloons into the traditional cell phone network and had partnerships with AT&T, Telkom Kenya and Telefonica in Peru.

Each flying tower was a helium polyethylene balloon the size of a tennis court with an altitude control system, solar panels, a satellite uplink for Google’s air traffic control, and every bit of the cell tower. The balloons would fly about 20 km above the Earth – much lower than a satellite in low orbit – and form a mesh network between them. The mesh network would have to be wide enough to cover the offline area and also wide enough to transmit to the traditional Internet, bringing the entire network online. Loon had no directional control, depending instead on different directions of the wind at various altitudes. At the height of the project, Google was launching 250 balloons a year, and they could float for 300 days before they needed to be recovered. I don’t think Google ever published an uptime metric, but Loon had its uses. At one point, Loon delivered connectivity to 200,000 people in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria destroyed Earth’s infrastructure. A commercial Loon service launched in Kenya in 2020.

It seems that the problem with Loon was that it was a unique solution with tons of special equipment, and if you’re targeting people on the other side of the digital divide with little purchasing power, it’s clear that they can’t pay for all that hardware by themselves. In this sense, a project like Spacelink’s Starlink seems more appropriate to reduce the digital divide. Starlink makes the rich and developed world pay for infrastructure, so SpaceX could subsidize access for developing countries. Loon certainly would have been more convenient, since it was a flying cell phone tower with a signal transmitted directly to your smartphone (Starlink requires an antenna the size of a pizza box), but when you’re talking about having no access the Internet at all, the more scalable solution looks better.

Part of Loon’s technology will survive in other Alphabet’s Internet access project, Projeto Taara, which aims to provide the Internet through a giant laser beam. Google’s wild experiments never end, do they?