Project Loon: Google’s quest to bring internet to the world with a fleet of balloons

Project Loon, Google’s ambitious plan to bring internet to the entire world by way of a network of high-altitude balloons, is preparing to launch a series of test flights in Australia. The tests will see 20 balloons launched across western Queensland and will be the first to be conducted in the country when they begin in December. Google has partnered with a wireless carrier to beam internet to the ground below — the flights are being run in partnership with Australia’s largest telecoms company, Telstra.

The balloons, developed by Google’s experimental research and development wing, Google X, have been running trial flights in the US and New Zealand for the last two years, with a few bumps along the way. In the US, a low-flying balloon destroyed power lines, knocking out the electricity supply to a few homes in a nearby Washington town. In New Zealand, a balloon landed at sea was misidentified as a crashed plane, causing emergency services to scramble to the scene. Google’s plan is potentially impressive, but it still has some kinks — the company told The Wall Street Journal at the time of the New Zealand test that it was difficult to keep free-floating balloons in one place thanks to the effects of wind.

When Google began testing its Wi-Fi enabling balloons, the company probably wasn’t expecting to cause panic in New Zealand. The Wall Street Journal writes that the country’s emergency services were contacted on Friday after one of the tech giant’s balloons was mistaken for a crashing plane. A rescue helicopter was sent to investigate the presumed wreckage, which was reported to be seen off the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island.

One year ago this Saturday, Google first presented its plans for Project Loon, a program aimed at blanketing the globe in internet from connected balloons hovering high above the earth. Since then, Google has only given a few updates about its ambitious plan, but today it tells Wired that it has a lot in store for Project Loon over the next year. Namely, that includes actually getting the program up and running and having real people use it. “On Loon’s two-year birthday, I would hope, instead of running experiments, we’ll have a more or less permanent set of balloons,” Google X leader Astro Teller tells Wired. “In one or several countries, you will turn on your phone and talk to the balloons.”

Though Google’s been conducting test flights for Loon, it soon plans to put more in the air at once and for longer periods of time. According to Wired, it wants to quadruple its current figures to 100 balloons in the air for 100 days each. Eventually, it’ll elevate that to between 300 and 400 balloons, enough to continually offer service to its still-unnamed target area.

Google has confirmed that a balloon involved in its Project Loon struck power lines and knocked out electricity for some residents of a Washington town last week. The company told NBC News that the balloon was “in the process of a controlled landing” at around 1AM when it took out a small number of electrical lines. Prior to the descent, Google notified FAA officials of the landing to avoid any risk of interference with nearby air traffic.

Unfortunately, Google has no way of ensuring its balloons won’t wreak havoc once they’re closer to the ground; there’s little the company can do about unexpected wind gusts, for example. Responding to the incident, a utility worker came upon “what appeared to be a weather balloon with blinking lights entangled in the power lines,” reported the Yakima Herald Republic. The entire scene was cleared by 6AM.

Google’s Project Loon aims to bring balloon-powered internet to remote regions around the world, and that’s an ambitious goal any way you slice it. But we’re starting to hear more about how Google plans to make its moonshot idea a reality. At the TechCrunch Disrupt NY conference earlier today, Googler Astro Teller revealed that the company actually went through a last-minute change in strategy before Project Loon was publicly announced.

The Google X team had spent six months negotiating with “large companies” to buy harmonized spectrum. “We thought this was absolutely critical to the project and we wanted to get it done before we launched,” Teller said. But when the plan was presented to CEO Larry Page, he was largely unimpressed.

Earlier this week, news broke that Facebook was working on a possible acquisition of Titan Aerospace, a company that produces solar-powered drones. These aircraft can travel in around the globe, relying on the sun for power to stay aloft for years at a time. They carry a payload of up to 250 pounds. Why does a social network need a high-tech satellite? Reportedly, Facebook wants to bring internet access to parts of the developing world that haven’t built out the infrastructure for web access on the ground.

That’s a noble mission, although Facebook certainly has a bigger business agenda as well. Most interestingly, the move means that Facebook is now competing directly with Google and its Project Loon to bring internet access to the rapidly shrinking landscape of the unwired world. Loon, which has been in beta testing since 2011, uses a swarm of weather balloons that cruise through the stratosphere and beam web access down to special receivers on the ground. So which approach is better: Loon or drone?

Anyone looking to poke a hole in Project Loon — Google’s ambitious project to use balloons to bring internet access to remote regions of the world — would likely point out that you can’t keep a balloon in one spot. Google has an answer for that, of course. The Project Loon team says it could use wind currents at different levels of the stratosphere to control where balloons move and ensure that the “flock” remains evenly spaced out. That, in turn, would make sure that people down below don’t have to wait for one of the airborne antennas to pass overhead before loading the internet.

Dan Piponi of Project Loon explains the technique by showing off some (very cool) simulations in a video released this week to explain the issue. By using publicly-available wind data, balloons can know when to increase or decrease in altitude to catch the current and stay in the right spot. The flock itself would continue to travel across the world — most of the winds in the stratosphere travel west to east — but a steady stream of balloons, evenly spaced out, could maintain stable internet access in areas targeted by the program.

Google X’s Project Loon intends to bring internet access to remote areas around the world through giant connected balloons — but while the project’s aspirations may be to help abroad, it isn’t going far from home for its next test run. Google is asking residents of California’s Central Valley for help in determining how robust the balloons’ internet connections are. Volunteers selected by Google will have a Loon antenna installed in their home or business, and when a balloon on a test run flies overhead, it’ll start stress testing the connection to see how it holds up.

Google had already begun an initial public test of Project Loon when it unveiled the experiment back in June. At the time, 50 testers had been set up in New Zealand, and Google said that it was planning to add more countries as time went on. The California test will run through the end of the year, but Google hasn’t said how many volunteers it’ll be taking throughout that duration of time. Those who are both interested and in the area will be able to apply over at Project Loon’s Google+ page.

Google X, a secretive division of the company that’s working on futuristic “moonshot” projects, unveiled a bizarre effort in June called “Project Loon:” an effort to beam internet access to remote regions of the globe from balloons that drift all over the planet. Unfortunately, balloons don’t have a good track record for staying in the air very long, which presents some non-traditional problems for the internet-age company. But as Wired’s Stephen Levy writes in a new feature on Project Loon, Google thinks its big data chops can help it solve centuries-old problems of flight. “Once we see how much better, cheaper, and safer we can make things by adding intelligence, all the things we think of now as solved will be thought of as being very much version 1.0,” Google’s Astro Teller tells Wired. “This is going to play out over and over again in our lifetimes.”

Bill Gates has questioned whether Google’s Project Loon, an effort to bring giant internet-giving balloons to less-developed countries, is really that good of an idea. During an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Gates was asked whether he thought bringing internet to parts of the world would help solve problems. “When you’re dying of malaria, I suppose you’ll look up and see that balloon, and I’m not sure how it’ll help you.”

Gates’ nonprofit organization, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has worked extensively to try to rid developing nations of malaria. “When a kid gets diarrhea, no, there’s no website that relieves that,” he continued, “certainly I’m a huge believer in the digital revolution. And connecting up primary-health-care centers, connecting up schools, those are good things. But no, those are not, for the really low-income countries, unless you directly say we’re going to do something about malaria.”

Like Google’s driverless cars, Project Loon is very much an experiment that’s in “very early days.” Google says that it has already built the system, however, carrying balloon at 60,000 feet, providing internet speeds “similar to today’s 3G networks or faster.” Balloons drift, of course, so Google says it’s using “complex algorithms and lots of computing power” to ensure that the balloons can move where they’re needed using a combination of wind and solar power — potentially floating around the entire globe at stratospheric heights. Google says that the balloons communicate with “specialized antennas,” that only work with Project Loon — so it’s not using traditional cellular or Wi-Fi tech. On the ground, internet providers can take the signal and move it to the last mile to users.

At Wired, Steven Levy reports that the project started “a little under two years ago.” Each balloon starts as an “envelope” that contains the polyethylene balloons and a 22-pound “payload” that contains all the computers and electronics.