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I know people who worked at Loon. It certainly wasn't shut down because of the lawsuit. It was pretty much because of X's move fast approach and they didn't thi

I know people who worked at Loon. It certainly wasn't shut down because of the lawsuit. It was pretty much because of X's move fast approach and they didn't think Loon would make money anytime soon. They killed another one of my favorite projects for same reasons: https://x.company/projects/makani/ https://x.company/projects/makani/

walrus01 4y ago
From the point of view of somebody who works in residential last mile internet service loon was always a pipe dream, because you'd need a truly absurd number of them to provide persistent packet-loss-free 24x7x365 coverage over a USA county sized area. Paying customers won't tolerate situations like "oh sorry the balloon has drifted away with the upper atmosphere winds, wait a few hours for maybe another one to be back in our region". With various ground based data relays for aggregating traffic coming from the PtMP balloon-to-cpe radio links. With advances in 600/700 MHz (and 2500 MHz band) based 3GPP rev-whatever tech for LTE-based last mile that can punch through trees, and starlink (and hopefully someday some viable non-spacex competitors for starlink), and other terrestrial WISP stuff, the need for something like loon is greatly decreased.
- alsodumb 4y ago
  Yeah it didn't make a lot of sense in most of continental United States and maybe that's why most of Loon's initial deployment testing was in Africa with sparser terrestrial network. Starlink definitely changed the rules and made LEO based systems a viable alternative for sure.
killjoywashere 4y ago
I had funding lined up for an experiment with Loon to deliver bandwidth to hospital ships, and now work with another guy who was at X during that time. Their perspectives are similar: the logistics to make this work with any reliability is truly heroic (I'm not asking for 5 9s, one 7 would be a good start). The experiments they did were incredible. But as a reliable asset ... good luck.

walrus01 4y ago

From the point of view of somebody who works in residential last mile internet service loon was always a pipe dream, because you'd need a truly absurd number of them to provide persistent packet-loss-free 24x7x365 coverage over a USA county sized area. Paying customers won't tolerate situations like "oh sorry the balloon has drifted away with the upper atmosphere winds, wait a few hours for maybe another one to be back in our region". With various ground based data relays for aggregating traffic coming from the PtMP balloon-to-cpe radio links. With advances in 600/700 MHz (and 2500 MHz band) based 3GPP rev-whatever tech for LTE-based last mile that can punch through trees, and starlink (and hopefully someday some viable non-spacex competitors for starlink), and other terrestrial WISP stuff, the need for something like loon is greatly decreased.

alsodumb 4y ago
Yeah it didn't make a lot of sense in most of continental United States and maybe that's why most of Loon's initial deployment testing was in Africa with sparser terrestrial network. Starlink definitely changed the rules and made LEO based systems a viable alternative for sure.

killjoywashere 4y ago

I had funding lined up for an experiment with Loon to deliver bandwidth to hospital ships, and now work with another guy who was at X during that time. Their perspectives are similar: the logistics to make this work with any reliability is truly heroic (I'm not asking for 5 9s, one 7 would be a good start). The experiments they did were incredible. But as a reliable asset ... good luck.