Loon's Balloons Will Fly Over Kenya in First Commercial Telecom Tryout

Kenya runs on mobile phones. And yet, outside of major cities like Nairobi, the infrastructure for mobile telephony is lacking. That's why, in 2019, telecommunications provider Telkom Kenya will begin turning to high-altitude balloons built by the Alphabet subsidiary Loon to provide mobile phone service. From a report: "High-altitude balloons are actually a very reasonable way to approach this problem," says Sal Candido, Loon's head of engineering. "They're high, they cover a lot of ground, and there are no obstacles." It's simple "but for one thing," Candido adds -- each balloon needs to stay in place in the stratosphere, providing coverage for one area for hundreds of days before being replaced. Candido has been with Loon for five years, long before the effort -- then known as Project Loon -- graduated from X, the Alphabet research and development subsidiary, in July 2018. Candido initially worked on developing the balloons' navigation system, one of the key components needed to address the "one thing" keeping the idea from really lifting off.

The challenge of how to navigate the balloons properly has changed drastically during Candido's time at Loon, because over the years the understanding of how Loon would operate has changed drastically as well. [...] As Loon launched more balloons for its test flights -- the company has now logged over 30 million kilometers -- the engineering team realized that they could control where the balloons would travel. "Sometimes the most obvious answer comes to you much later on," Candido says. "Why don't the balloons just not leave the coverage area?" It turns out that this is possible, at least in most places, for reasonable durations.

Skynet

[davidwr]

literally.

Re:

[Paradise Pete]

What would be the point of surveilling primitives who burn feces for heat? What information could possibly be gleamed.

And eventually those primitives would even know the difference between gleamed and gleaned.

Written by someone who's not visited Kenya

[Anonymous Coward]

> And yet, outside of major cities like Nairobi, the infrastructure for mobile telephony is lacking.

That's rubbish. The mobile network in Kenya has been mature for years. 8 years ago I routinely found the mobile network in Kenya was better than the south-east (the most prosperous region) of the UK. Any significant town had 3.5G. Places in the middle of nowhere with no water or electricity had EDGE Internet working at the full 250kbps. And that's 8 years ago. I know, because I ran a business on it.

Re:

[currently_awake]

Balloons have poor ability to remain stationary. They rise and fall to catch the different direction of winds at different altitudes, but due to variations in the wind you'll eventually have to bring one down and truck it upwind to maintain coverage. A drone aircraft powered by microwaves from the ground (solar powered ground stations also provide telephone trunk connections) can fly in circles for months without issue.

Re:

[Shotgun]

Or, you could put those same propellers on the balloon (just turn the drone sideways), and add the solar cells directly to the gondola (much simpler than a microwave uplink with tracking). It could easily carry enough solar cells to make it completely self sustaining, remain on station for years, and would me much more fail soft in the event of a propulsion failure. Drones falling from the stratosphere can do great damage.

Re:

[currently_awake]

The large balloon will act like a sail, and require a lot of power to remain on station. Those solar panels need to be light, and that makes them vulnerable to storms. You also need batteries for at night. This significantly increases the weight. Winged drones take less power than a quadcopter and glide to the ground when they break.

Loon

[alvinrod]

If I didn’t already know this was something that Google had started years and years ago, I would get money that this was yet another weird little venture that Elon Musk had come up with.