
Alphabet's Project Loon says it will run the program with fewer balloons - JumpCrisscross
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-16/alphabet-scraps-plan-to-blanket-globe-with-internet-balloons
======
aresant
So the story after the headline is that Alphabet hired a seasoned Satellite
Broadband guy, Tom Moore, to run the division and he pushed them to make the
project more efficient, and ultimately profitable.

This has Ruth Porat's stamp all over it - they hired her as CFO to bring
"financial discipline" to Alphabet, and among those duties was to rein the
moonshot stuff into actual businesses, or kill them off.

I actually think this is good news for Alphabet's long term ability to
innovate: if they can demonstrate that some of these Moonshots can stand on
their own their investors / board will be more apt to provide for freedom to
innovate over the long term.

~~~
shmerl
Slowing down Google Fiber doesn't sound good to me, while it probably comes
from the same idea.

~~~
nostrademons
I think the idea behind the GFiber shrinkage is that WebPass achieves the same
end result, but doesn't require the extremely time-consuming, expensive, and
risky negotiation for right-of-ways on the poles or digging permits that
GFiber would've. If so, then economically at least Webpass is the way to go.
At least, that's the theory. It'd suck to scale back GFiber and then find out
that Webpass wouldn't actually scale to a nationwide roll-out either.

I'm sad to see GFiber go as well, I worked on it right before its launch and
was really hoping I'd get to try it out as a customer.

~~~
shmerl
Wireless does not achieve the same result. It has a lot of downsides and more
limited application.

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hellofunk
If many years ago, someone told me that a humongous company named Alphabet was
thinking about deploying balloons all over the world, I'd have told you a
thing or two about having a charming imagination.

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rmason
This is an absolutely horrible and misleading headline. I was stunned when I
read it. I'd just read earlier in the day how the Google scientists had
ingeniously figured out how to keep balloons in a single spot for months at a
time greatly reducing the projects cost.

So basically Project Loon is still going to blanket the globe with Internet
balloons. They're just going to accomplish the same original goal with far
fewer balloons.

~~~
Animats
The article seems to indicate that they're downsizing that project to a small
experiment, with 10-30 balloons. Sort of like Google Fiber, which had huge
hype and very modest deployment. Before that, there was Google Public WiFi,
which covered Mountain View, CA badly, and then went into some Starbucks.
Maybe Google/Alphabet should stop trying to be a carrier. Their track record
in that business is terrible.

~~~
oculusthrift
google is an expert at soaking up the good publicity for their "moonshots" and
then not delivering. and they slowly fail to where people don't notice it and
get excited for the next shiny thing

~~~
morgosmaci
The saying is you miss 100% of the (moon)shots you don't attempt.

~~~
mdorazio
The point of the parent comment is that they don't fully attempt them. They
put forth just enough time and money investment to make a big PR splash and
get a proof of concept out the door, then slowly back away from things.

~~~
zeroxfe
So how do you define "fully attempt"?

Both projects made immense progress over many years -- they just weren't able
to justify the costs. IMO, they were actually really good attempts.

~~~
mdorazio
How do you define "immense progress"? Fully attempt to me means actually
sinking a significant portion of overall company budget (say, greater than 5%)
into a project, marketing it, and attempting to spread it to a wide market. Or
put it another way, if a venture-backed startup were pursuing one of these
avenues, what would they do? Certainly they wouldn't be content with pilot
projects that fizzle out and glacially slow deployment across the country. If
Uber were a Google moonshot, they would still be running only black cars in
SF.

Google is fantastic at highly-automated software, but really sucks at any kind
of real world hardware or service.

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mrkgnao
> Loon engineers turned to the computing power of Google to improve the
> navigational system

That earned a chuckle.

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samstave
Maybe musks satellite idea is better and they like it?

~~~
exabrial
The problem is the speed of light is too slow :( Latency just orbit and back
is 50ms+

~~~
baddox
There are lots of different orbits. The ISS is 250 miles away, which shouldn't
cause much of a latency problem. Of course, it's a compromise between the
number of satellites and the latency.

~~~
highd
There's also issues with how fast the satellites move across the sky. At low
orbits they fly by and you either need ridiculously sensitive wide angle
antennas or solid-state steerable high-gain antennas that track them as they
go by.

See ex: [https://www.kymetacorp.com/](https://www.kymetacorp.com/)

~~~
greglindahl
It's a solved problem, the question is how expensive the ground stations are.

Iridium phones have always worked with fast-moving satellites. The 9555 phone
is $939 on Amazon, and the Iridium Go hotspot is $689. Ideally, an internet
access terminal would be closer to $100, but if you're sharing the connection
with a bunch of neighbors using mesh WiFi, $689 is doable.

~~~
jhpankow
Iridium GO has the bandwidth of a dialup modem.

~~~
greglindahl
But there's no reason why higher bandwidth equipment is going to be more
(edit: I meant hugely more....) expensive: same pointing problem to solve.

BTW there's going to be higher bandwidth (edit: adding Ka band to the previous
L) from Iridium once Iridium NEXT is fully up.

~~~
highd
Higher bandwidth means more noise, which means you need either higher gain or
more sensitive detection (until you hit thermal limits). They're very
interrelated issues.

~~~
greglindahl
The overall discussion in this sub-thread is the cost of being able to point
at fast-moving satellites.

For straight bandwidth, how the the price of phone modems go up from the first
analog phones to 5G? Seems to have not been much of a burden to phone prices.
(Edit: shaped beams in the cell towers make a huge difference.)

~~~
highd
I'm addressing your point that it's a solved problem. The issues around making
high bandwidth data interconnects are not just "straight bandwidth". I'm
explaining that there are fundamental interconnections between bandwidth and
SNR that make large bandwidths harder to build at sufficient SNR:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson%E2%80%93Nyquist_noise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson%E2%80%93Nyquist_noise)

The iridium satellite receivers use low-gain antennas, so reception is limited
to small bandwidths. This means they don't care where the satellites are. New
technology will enable high-gain antennas that can track the motion of
satellites, enabling much higher channel rates.

~~~
greglindahl
I think you misunderstand what I meant by "it". I added a few notes to my
earlier comments; you're assuming that the new satellites don't have higher
power or tighter beams? Not to mention that low-end WiFi equipment now has
shaped beams, so it's not exactly rocket science to have that in an Iridium
receiver. As a former radio astronomer who did some VLBI, solid state phased
arrays are easy to understand, I'm mostly glad that I don't have to be the
person making them affordable in a few-hundred-$ ground station!

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jonknee
That's a poor title considering they've actually had a lot of success with
their balloons, so much so that they will be able to use less of them. That
means it's actually more likely to happen.

~~~
dang
Ok, we edited the title to use language from the article. If someone can
suggest a better (more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.

------
usaphp
By the comments here it looks like 8/10 people on HN just comment without
actually reading the article itself. Google aren't scrapping the whole idea of
balloons, they just found a better way and faster way to make it a profitable
business.

~~~
purple-again
Reddit trained me to comments first then article if it's worth it. I imagine
it's the same for a lot of people. Far too often the top comment is telling
you all about why the article you were about to read is complete bullshit.

~~~
scorpioxy
I'm the same but that's because of the so-many bullshit articles I had to read
before figuring this out. Now I read the comments first and learned to stay
away from certain sources with frequent low quality content. Also, this
happens when you give hackers imaginary points; they want to game the system.

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ultrahate
Slightly tangential, but I'm really interested at the political influence of
what space satellites or balloon Internet might do.

I'm considering a scenario where a nefarious, space-capable entity is capable
of disabling satellites. Idk I guess from the perhspective of like a civil
engineer or something, it seems that an idea where your infrastructure is out
of reach or particularly vulnerable seems like a bad idea.

There could be """accidental""" space object collisions, direct attacks on
them, or even just unforeseeable maintenance difficulties trying to take care
of dozens or hundreds or thousands of objects not immediately available to us,
serving an incredibly critical and global backbone of infrastructure, for more
or less every industry on earth, or potentially ventures off earth as well.

What an exciting time to be alive, it's like some Twilight Zone Star Trek
mashup lately.

Edit: the title of this post is pretty dumb btw, I contend it should be
changed to reflect changes in the program, not its abandonment

~~~
jmgao
> it seems that an idea where your infrastructure is out of reach or
> particularly vulnerable seems like a bad idea.

Is it better to have your infrastructure where someone with a shovel, or a
fishing boats dragging its anchor can cause catastrophic damage?

~~~
ultrahate
No, but you might notice I didn't exactly advocate for under sea cable
proliferation either. It has the same (percieved, I'm no expert) flaws.

~~~
unwind
So how should we connect e.g. the US to Europe, then? Sure there are flaws and
vulnerabilities, but the alternative seems ... worse.

~~~
ultrahate
Well I don't know, I didn't say I knew. I'm just pointing out that there are
obvious weak points in critical infrastructure in space, as there are weak
points in undersea cables, etc. Lots of infrastructure has bad aspects. I wish
I had some deeper, enlightening insight about it all, but I don't.

------
exabrial
I thought this was a cool project

~~~
QuercusMax
Reading the article is helpful to make informed comments.

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Jam-B
Who does what with what?

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mturmon
I would think it would be demoralizing, over time, to work on ambitious
projects that turn out to never be fielded. (See also the linked stories on
Titan and Wing, e.g.
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-11/alphabet-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-11/alphabet-
says-it-shut-down-titan-drone-internet-project)) One of the draws of working
for a bigcorp is that your work has the power of the organization behind it,
to help it succeed.

~~~
QuercusMax
...except that's not what it's saying at all. They're scaling back their
initial goal to deploy worldwide because it's working so well in smaller
deployments, and the worldwide deployment doesn't make sense.

~~~
mturmon
Strong disagree. Every other sentence in the article is about scaling back!
Which _successful_ small developments did you see substantiated in the
article? The Sri Lanka development mentioned in TFA seems to have been
abandoned ([http://www.dailymirror.lk/article/-Proposed-Google-Loon-
proj...](http://www.dailymirror.lk/article/-Proposed-Google-Loon-project-in-
danger-123942.html)). The one in India seems to have been abandoned.

It looks like the project has narrowed down into a focused "small demo" phase
that is _no longer commensurate_ with the original scope of the project.

Remember how Google exited Fiber? It was the same combination of re-scoping
and backing away from nationwide ambition, over years.

It sucks when novel, ambitious engineering ideas don't get the support
initially promised (I could tell stories...), but we can't fail to see the
directional information given in the article.

~~~
Eridrus
The news about Sri Lanka is disappointing, but unless you think it's entirely
spin it seems reasonable to look at other countries where carriers may be
friendlier and spectrum easier to acquire.

