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Google closes Loon helium balloon project

 


Oakland, California. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, will close its well-known subsidiary, Loon, which spun out of a laboratory that used high-altitude helium balloons to provide cellular connections from the stratosphere.

Approximately 10 years after the project started, Alphabet said Thursday that it unplugged Loon because it couldn’t find a way to reduce the cost of building a sustainable business. Alongside the self-driving car unit Waymo, Loon was one of the most hyped Moonshot technology projects from Alphabets Lab X.

The road to commercial viability has proven to be much longer and more risky than expected. As a result, he made the difficult decision to close Loon. Astro Teller, who leads X, writes in a blog post. Alphabet said it plans to close operations in the coming months, hoping to find other positions for Loon employees at Alphabet.

The idea behind Loon was to bring cellular connectivity to remote parts of the world where traditional mobile networks are too difficult and too costly to build. Alphabet has touted this technology as a potentially promising way to provide Internet connectivity to the last billion, not just the next one billion consumers.

A giant helium balloon made from polyethylene sheets is the size of a tennis court. They were powered by solar panels and navigated by flight control software that used artificial intelligence to efficiently drift through the stratosphere. While in the air, they act as floating cell towers, sending Internet signals to ground stations and personal devices.

Google started developing Loon in 2011 and started the project in public testing in 2013. Loon became an independent subsidiary in 2018, a few years after Google became a holding company called Alphabet. In April 2019, we received a $ 125 million investment from a SoftBank unit called HAPS Mobile to facilitate the use of high altitude vehicles to provide internet connectivity.

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January 22, 2021, 8:52 AM Eastern Standard Time

Last year, it announced the first commercial deployment of technology with Telkom Kenya to provide 4G LTE network connectivity in an area of ​​approximately 31,000 square miles in central and western Kenya, including the capital Nairobi. Prior to that, balloons were used only in emergencies, such as after Hurricane Maria knocked out Puerto Rico’s cellular network.

However, according to The Information’s November report, Loon was starting to run out of money and relied on Alphabet to maintain a business solution while looking for another investor in the project.

The decision to shut down Loon is another sign of Alphabets’ recent austerity for its ambitious and costly tech project. Under Ruth Porat, Alphabets’ Chief Financial Officer since 2015, the company has closely monitored the finances of so-called OtherBets startups aimed at diversifying from their core advertising business.

Alphabet actively promotes other bets such as the life sciences divisions Waymo and Verily, accepting outside investors and developing its own business. Projects that failed to secure external investment or showed sufficient financial prospects, such as Macani, a project that produces wind energy kites that Alphabet closed last year, were abandoned.

Its austerity is an ambitious tech project, even though units like X, which was the favorite vanity project of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, remain uncertain about their financial outlook. It was a remarkable change from the time when we had the autonomy to spend freely in pursuing.

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