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Google Communications The Internet

Breakthrough in Alphabet's Balloon-Based Internet Project Means It Might Actually Work (recode.net) 82

Posted by msmash from the it's-happening dept.
Loon, the balloon project that aims to deliver internet to parts of the world that lack reliable connectivity, announced this week that due to advancements in the machine learning software, it can now deploy fewer balloons to provide greater connectivity. From a report on Recode: The Loon balloon project is part of X, the experimental division of Alphabet, Google's parent company. Now in its fourth year, the engineers at Loon say their new machine learning techniques significantly shorten their timeline for launching the project. Initially, engineers proposed that the Loon balloons would float around the globe and that they would have to find a way to keep the balloons a safe traveling distance apart and replace a balloon that drifted from an area that needed connectivity. Now, the team says they've found a way to keep the balloons in a much more concentrated location, thanks to their improved altitude control and navigation system. Loon says that balloons will now make small loops over a land mass, instead of circumnavigating the whole planet.
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Breakthrough in Alphabet's Balloon-Based Internet Project Means It Might Actually Work More

Breakthrough in Alphabet's Balloon-Based Internet Project Means It Might Actually Work

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  • will it Wor? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Wor is cool... would be even better if it worked though

  • Why? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Why do these companies keep working on such nonsense? Solar drones, loon balloons, thousands of micro satellites... why not parter with local telecoms and hardwire this shit?

    • Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Fwipp ( 1473271 ) on Friday February 17, 2017 @12:10PM (#53886565)

      Because, Chad, lots of places don't have "local telecoms."

      • Still, sticking a pole in the ground seems easier than keeping a balloon overhead.

        • In Chad? Do you know how many people have to be paid off to keep the pole where you put it?

          The problem is kleptocracies. Balloons are out of reach of the local governments.

      • I couldn't think of many. Even in the most backwater areas I found people running around with mobile phones.

        • They are probably running around to look for, you know, reception

          • Oh that's what they were doing when they were gyrating and flailing. I thought it's, you know, some sort of weird rain dance.

        • Anecdotes are not data, Africa, central Asia, and Oceana are really big, I'm willing to hazard a guess there are places you didn't go.
      • Don't worry, I know you were calling GP a dense, simpleminded frat boy who has no concept of how the world actually works, as opposed to referring to the country Chad. Apparently Slashdot is still coming to terms with how commas and sentence structures work.

    • Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JoeMerchant ( 803320 ) on Friday February 17, 2017 @12:11PM (#53886571)

      Why do these companies keep working on such nonsense? Solar drones, loon balloons, thousands of micro satellites... why not parter with local telecoms and hardwire this shit?

      Clearly you've never dealt with Comcast.

      • In my experience, google should have just suggested they'd go with a competitor.

        Google: "How much for us to run fiber on your network nationwide?"
        Comcast: "TEN BILLION DOLLARS!!!"
        Google: "Hmm... hey, do you know what centurylink's phone number is?"
        Comcast: "I MEAN TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS!"
        Google: "I've heard good things about verizon's network..."
        Comcast: "WE WILL PAY YOU A MILLION DOLLARS!"

        I know they are willing to take a big reduction in their outrageous profits just to maintain their near monopo

    • Because the telecoms are the reason all this ridiculous shit is necessary to begin with.

      If the telecoms weren't the grasping motherfuckers that they are, we would already have the high speed networks we already paid for through excise taxes for the last 20 years, and Google wouldn't have to spend the resources to try to work around them.

  • How do we measure that? What does it mean?

  • Wor (Score:2)

    by Daetrin ( 576516 )
    Wor never changes.

  • improved altitude control and navigation system

    sounds more like improved physical capabilities - maybe they got smarter at the same time, but it doesn't matter how smart your loon is if it can't do anything with that knowledge.

  • "Can it work?" is not the question... (Score:3)

    by bobbied ( 2522392 ) on Friday February 17, 2017 @12:19PM (#53886629)

    "Is it worth doing?" is the question,

    Technically, there is no reason this cannot be made to work. However, financially, it may not be workable.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Guspaz ( 556486 )

      When the alternative is paying $60 million to launch a GEO satellite that has more than half a second of lag because of how far away it is, a cheap balloon seems pretty financially viable to me.

      • Satellites already exist for data connections and are quasi profitable. However there are technical issues with satellites for broad band internet service, and the biggest is the available spectral space is quite limiting for vast tracts of the developed world. Basically the issues with satellites are more than just cost

        But that begs the question here really.. Is this new approach of using temporary balloon based distribution with the effort? I'm not so sure. Where I see the advantage of this idea, ho

        • 802.11 doesn't work anyway, because the round trip times will be too large for the standard ACK timeout.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Guspaz ( 556486 )

            A trivial problem to solve when you can just increase the timeout values. I believe the recommendation is to add 2 s per 300 metres. These things don't need to support standard 802.11.

      • The alternative is not doing either, and investing your money in a totally different project.

  • I loved Wor! (Score:3)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Friday February 17, 2017 @12:30PM (#53886691)

    Wizard of Wor was one of my favorite arcade games back in the early 1980's.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_Wor [wikipedia.org]

  • But it wor! I tell you it wor!

  • These new network balloons provide super reliable connec@FA#$F^xF1zNO CARRIER

  • Will it "Wor" like Google Fiber? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I loved how all the Google fanbois crowed how Google Fiber was going to put local ISPs out of business because, you know, Google.

    So much for that...

  • The Goodyear Internet Blimp or worse....brought to by "Facebook. We now power everything."

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