Google Project Loon Internet by balloons - PCself

Into Google has launched an ambitious program that aims to bring the Internet to billions of people who live in remote areas, poor or affected by natural disasters. The Mountain View giant, through its official blog, announced the project called “Loon Project” which aims to create “an Internet network in the sky”.

Into To do this, we will use the balloons inflated with helium of about 15 meters in diameter, which will fly at an altitude of 20,000 meters and in this first experimental phase will allow connections to 3G speeds or even higher. Each balloon is equipped with solar panels capable of providing electrical power to electronic devices such as radios, antennas, flight computer and control system of the altitude. In the same way in which a satellite communicates with the ground, a base station located on the ground connected to the Internet can connect with a balloon and send data which will then be retransmitted to individual transceivers positioned in each geographic area to be covered.

The receiving antenna of the user

Into The first test of the project was started in New Zealand, where Google is testing the first 30 balloons from about 50 users experimenters present in that territory. “In the future, we would like to start pilot programs in countries that share the latitude with New Zealand,” said Mike Cassidy, director of the project within the Google X Lab This group includes countries such as Argentina, Chile, South Africa or Australia, which lies on the 40th parallel and having stratospheric conditions ideal for the Google project. “Loon Project” was developed by engineers at Google X Lab, which is located in Silicon Valley (California) and working on revolutionary technologies such as Google Glass or driverless car. (The article follows down )

Into “We can move the balls up and down to take the wind currents in which we who travel”, they know the company’s engineers, “but this solution has led us to a new problem: how to manage a fleet of balloons sailing around the world so that each ball is in the area where we want to be at the right time. We are solving this problem with some complex algorithms and a lot of computing power. “