
Introducing Project Loon: Balloon-powered Internet access - cleverjake
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/introducing-project-loon.html
======
Mithrandir
I took a screenshot of one of the videos:
[http://i.imgur.com/nppgVPG.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/nppgVPG.jpg)

Perhaps Iridium refers to the Iridium satellite constellation
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation))
(Edit: or maybe one of their products
[http://www.iridium.com/Products.aspx](http://www.iridium.com/Products.aspx))
and "SBD service" refers to something like this:
[http://www.iridium.com/products/IridiumSBD.aspx?section=supp...](http://www.iridium.com/products/IridiumSBD.aspx?section=support)
?

Edit 2: Perhaps they were tracking the balloon?

~~~
espadrine
Looking at the solar information (on the left), power doesn't look too good.

Would these balloons still work during the night? Would they need to stay in
the day? Would that even be possible, given the speed of the wind?

~~~
wmf
It says on the site that they charge during the day and run off batteries at
night.

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jervisfm
I am impressed with both the ambitiousness and nobleness of the project that
Google is pursuing here. It's true: most of the world's population is not
actually online despite how it might feel otherwise to most people who are
already online.

I am glad that they are working on important issues like this and I hope the
project is successful in bringing more of the world's people online.

~~~
atirip
What are you celebrating about? What they do is deliver advertising, nothing
more, nothing less - ADVERTISING.

~~~
bitsoda
Oh no, a company is building out a network of Internet-connected balloons, but
I might have to look at some text advertising links. The horror. You see ads
everywhere, t-shirts, bus stops, billboards, your friends/family, etc. It's a
trade-off I'll take.

~~~
1morepassword
We're living in 2013, and this is a tech forum, so let's get real: advertising
is about tracking, about total surveillance, not sticking a logo on a bus.

That's what Google does, that's what Google's motives are. Every damn time, so
there is no reason to assume this is any different.

That's not a "trade-off", that is surrendering.

If the government would set up a balloon network to track everyone you would
be screaming bloody murder, but it's Google and people get internet access in
exchange it's okay?

~~~
speeq
It's okay if I agree to it. I'd rather see ads than pay for all the services
Google provides to me free of charge (money). I don't and I'd never agree that
a government tracks me. For me, that's a big difference.

If a company uses their profit (e.g. from ads) to provide and finance
something as extremely useful and important as free internet access to
developing countries - then yes, that's totally fine for me.

Yes this is a forum, people have their own personal opinion.

~~~
1morepassword
> It's okay if I agree to it.

That's the typical fallacy. If Chinese factory worker agrees to be exploited
in conditions close to slavery doesn't mean that that kind of exploitation is
"okay".

Tempting people for whom the price of these services is too high to surrender
their basic right to privacy is ethically questionable at best, and in my
personal opinion should be made illegal.

What if Google asked people to give up their right to vote, would you think
that was okay? Were do you draw the line?

The protection of civil liberties includes the protection of those who don't
care about them, because if they can sell out their rights to greedy
corporations, it affects _all_ of us.

It's not just about your personal choice. A world in which corporations yield
such power affects everyone.

~~~
penrod
A normative statement that you disagree with is not a "fallacy".

Also, seeing as there is no legally enforceable way that Google could ask
anyone to surrender their right to vote, it's an odd hypothetical to base an
argument on. Especially an argument for restricting people's freedoms.

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salimmadjd
If there ever was any justification of using up our limited helium is this
one. However, I wish for these types of projects they would use hydrogen
instead. I understand the safety concern, but a century after Hindenburg, we
should be able to make these safer. At least for non-human flights. Not to
mention Hydrogen is a bit better in creating lift.

~~~
Filligree
The solution is, of course, for Google to build lunar fusion reactors to make
helium and power the Earth.

~~~
3825
We need a cheaper way to move freight between the Earth and the Moon first. I
believe here is what Filligree is talking about if anyone else is curious.

>
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3)

> Materials on the Moon's surface contain helium-3 at concentrations on the
> order of between 1.4 and 15 ppb in sunlit areas, and may contain
> concentrations as much as 50 ppb in permanently shadowed regions. A number
> of people, starting with Gerald Kulcinski in 1986, have proposed to explore
> the moon, mine lunar regolith and use the helium-3 for fusion. Recently,
> companies as Planetary Resources have also stated to be interested in mining
> helium-3 on the moon. Because of the low concentrations of helium-3, any
> mining equipment would need to process extremely large amounts of regolith
> (over 150 million tonnes of regolith to obtain one ton of helium 3), and
> some proposals have suggested that helium-3 extraction be piggybacked onto a
> larger mining and development operation.

(removed citation notes for readability)

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speeq
You know what would be awesome? If they'd open-source the technology behind
these balloons - so that we could build and launch our own!

My relatives live in a tiny village on the south coast of India and whenever I
visit them I have to use the extremely slow 2G network. I tether my Android
phone and basically setup a little WLAN hotspot there. The next bigger city
with fast internet connectivity and 3G coverage is almost an hour bus drive
away.

Every student in the village now possesses a laptop with WLAN capabilities.
They got them for free - basically as a bribe so that the villagers stop
protesting against the construction of a nuclear power plant the government is
building nearby:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koodankulam_Nuclear_Power_Plant](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koodankulam_Nuclear_Power_Plant)

But that's another issue.

I would love to build a wireless mesh network using cheap routers with an
open-source firmware like OpenWRT for these kids. Internet connectivity could
be achieved by using a single uplink antenna to Project Loon.

Speaking for myself, I had the privilege - unlike most of my family - to grow
up in Europe and believe me, having access to the Internet completely changed
my life. I’ve had access to free resources, taught myself how to program and I
am now making a living out of it.

I want anyone on this planet to have full, free, uncensored and fast access to
the Internet.

Thank you Google for doing such a project! I really hope it will work as
planned and I wish you all the best on this journey.

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bionerd
This is, without any doubt, the most incredible thing I've seen for the past
15 years I'm the citizen of the internet. The scope of this plan and its
possibilities are just amazing.

Sadly, my enthusiasm is quite clouded in the light of recent events involing
the whole NSA/PRISM thing but then... it's governments that are the problem,
not Google.

I sincerely hope that this will change the world for the better and not the
worse.

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anigbrowl
It's all a plot to monitor everyone all the time. Naturally, I think it's
awesome.

~~~
leoc
It's not hard to imagine some political tensions if these things are supposed
to do a full circuit of the Earth on a given latitude. It's true that balloons
in the stratosphere have a lot in common with satellites in orbit, but that
may not be enough to stop people getting annoyed.

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DigitalSea
I find this to be really clever and it kind of reminds me of The Pirate Bay's
plans to build servers that actually float above the ocean to prevent being
taken down. People laughed at The Pirate Bay for the ridiculousness of the
idea, but here Google is essentially proving it's not a pipe-dream and
bandwidth capable balloons can one day be a reality.

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mh-
their acquisition[1] of Makani and their "airborne wind turbine" tech suddenly
makes more sense to me.

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/22/google-x-acquires-makani-
po...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/22/google-x-acquires-makani-power-and-
its-airborne-wind-turbines/)

~~~
riffraff
I may be wrong, but I believe all the high-altitude-wind-energy thingies work
by having the flying bit tethered to the ground, while this baloons seem to
fly much higher, making the two seem incompatible to me.

~~~
mh-
you're not wrong- the airborne turbines are operable tethered to the ground.

but, there previously wasn't much value to Makani in exploring untethered
solutions; they needed transmission lines going back to the surface, anyway.

I don't believe Google intends to use the two technologies together directly.
there's just more synergy here than it may appear, on the surface.

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yalogin
Another cool part about this is the balloons will be floating at twice the
height of commercial flights. That would mean commercial flights could get
internet through these as well.

Commercial airliners travel at 30-40k feet. Twice that would be very high.
Won't the service be sluggish and slow because of that?

~~~
unwind
Google says:

 _(80 000 feet) / the speed of light = 81.336269 microseconds_

So no, that's not a very big amount of latency. Not to be confused with the
latency you get to satellites, which is much much larger due to them being way
further out.

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gvb
Anyone know (and able to tell) what radios, frequencies, and antennas are
being used for the experiments? The antenna balls on the houses are
interesting - I'm guessing there is an actively pointed directional antenna
inside.

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confluence
Obviously very cool (but not without precedent). The things I'm wondering
about is cost and resilience. What do they cost? And could bad actors bring
them down with lasers?

~~~
Sven7
As long as they cost less than putting up cell phone towers in the middle of
nowhere, its all good. Idk but I don't imagine cell phone towers cover a 40km
radius. Telco's have no great incentive to do this so kudos to Google.

And as Larry Page said, stop already with the obvious negativity. Bad actors
can bring down cell phone towers too. And who cares about precedents.

~~~
riffraff
AFAIR the GSM radius was about that (35-40km) I imagine more recent
technologies may have some more. But of course this suffers a lot from
topography.

~~~
Sami_Lehtinen
There's reason why they extended it (Enhanced Extended Range). It was only
technical limit due TDMA timing advance. It had nothing to do with the actual
signal reception strength / transmission power required. So in 800 MHz range
120 kilometers should be well achievable with 2 W transmitter.

"GSM has a fixed maximum cell site range of 120 km, which is imposed by
technical limitations. This is expanded from the old limit of 35 km."

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cclogg
Is New Zealand now the test-zone for everything? App betas, and now this
project lol.

~~~
steveh73
It's a small, english-speaking country, relatively isolated in space and time
from the primary markets.

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pstuart
This combined with Tor could be interesting....

------
jedanbik
Why don't they focus their energy on making satellite access more affordable?
Looks like Google is trying to make its own emerging niche demographic to
profit from. You've got to be kidding yourself if you think a floating balloon
has anything to do with sustainable, lasting infrastructure. Balloons are
cheap, and that's the end of the story.

Another thing: satellites don’t pop.

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Ecko
So will satellite things will get blocked due to these balloon s ??

~~~
wmf
I would guess not. They're on a different frequency and their cross-section is
almost nothing. It's probably no worse than a large bird flying in front of
your dish.

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kayoone
April 1st? Hm no, awesome!

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melloclello
I think it would be nice for there to be some reserved places on the Earth's
surface which can remain undisturbed by the internet. Soon, you're going to
need a boat just to escape its corrupting influence.

PS If I was a Cantabrian farmer and I saw one of these above my property I'd
have my shotgun out, quick as.

~~~
veemjeem
You'd probably need a missile to shoot it down. The balloons are probably
80,000ft above ground. I'm not sure if there's anything that can shoot a
bullet that high. Maybe a high powered railgun?

~~~
sicxu
You can use another "attacker" balloon to do it.

~~~
veemjeem
There are probably many ways to shoot down the balloon, but it's probably out
of the technological reach of a farmer. I don't think there's anything off the
shelf that could shoot something down from 80,000ft.

