
Google to beam wifi to Indonesia’s rural areas with balloons - williswee
https://www.techinasia.com/indonesia-internet-google-alphabet-project-loon/
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ck2
With all the nonsense yesterday about the military's lost ballon and what a
boondoggle the whole program was, I was thinking they should be repurposed to
provide internet.

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azurezyq
Do you have the context of that thing?

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fixermark
[http://www.airforcetimes.com/story/military/2015/10/28/f-16s...](http://www.airforcetimes.com/story/military/2015/10/28/f-16s-tracking-
blimp-loose/74746356/)

Long story short: an aerostat broke loose of its mooring in Aberdeen Proving
Ground and floated into Pennsylvania. It caused a bit of damage (trailing
mooring cable fouled power lines and knocked out electricity to tens of
thousands of customers), but went down in a field.

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potatote
I wonder: How much Helium does each balloon takes and how long does each last
once it's filled up?

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rtkwe
They're supposed to last ~100 days and are pretty large. The time was one of
the big points they had to address to get the economics right. The balloons
had to last much longer than a normal balloon would.

[https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-1EOC6WWfgA8/UbvU_yFNsKI/A...](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-1EOC6WWfgA8/UbvU_yFNsKI/AAAAAAAAAFA/qTKWiy0SsFc/w1223-h815-no/00E.jpg)

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eco
I thought Project Loon switched from wifi to LTE last year.

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rtkwe
This has probably been in the works for more than a year so they might not
have had LTE coverage on the table. Also wifi is arguably more useful than LTE
signals to people on the ground since more devices will be able to receive and
use it beyond just cell phones and a small number of LTE equipped laptops.

It could have also been a requirement to get the telecoms to work with the
project and get it approved.

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gondo
is there a map of planned coverage? i find it incredibly difficult to find
reliable coverage map for any Indonesian internet provider

