5 ms·

Introducing Project Loon: Balloon-powered Internet access

189 points by cleverjake 13y ago

mh- 13y ago
their acquisition[1] of Makani and their "airborne wind turbine" tech suddenly makes more sense to me. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/22/google-x-acquires-makani-power-and-its-airborne-wind-turbines/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/22/google-x-acquires-makani-po...
- mdturnerphys 13y ago
  I thought the same thing a few weeks ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5776908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5776908
- riffraff 13y ago
  I may be wrong, but I believe all the high-altitude-wind-energy thingies work by having the flying bit tethered to the ground, while this baloons seem to fly much higher, making the two seem incompatible to me.
  - mh- 13y ago
    you're not wrong- the airborne turbines are operable tethered to the ground. but, there previously wasn't much value to Makani in exploring untethered solutions; they needed transmission lines going back to the surface, anyway. I don't believe Google intends to use the two technologies together directly. there's just more synergy here than it may appear, on the surface.
anigbrowl 13y ago
It's all a plot to monitor everyone all the time. Naturally, I think it's awesome.
- leoc 13y ago
  It's not hard to imagine some political tensions if these things are supposed to do a full circuit of the Earth on a given latitude. It's true that balloons in the stratosphere have a lot in common with satellites in orbit, but that may not be enough to stop people getting annoyed.
jervisfm 13y ago
I am impressed with both the ambitiousness and nobleness of the project that Google is pursuing here. It's true: most of the world's population is not actually online despite how it might feel otherwise to most people who are already online. I am glad that they are working on important issues like this and I hope the project is successful in bringing more of the world's people online.
- atirip 13y ago
  What are you celebrating about? What they do is deliver advertising, nothing more, nothing less - ADVERTISING.
  - bitsoda 13y ago
    Oh no, a company is building out a network of Internet-connected balloons, but I might have to look at some text advertising links. The horror. You see ads everywhere, t-shirts, bus stops, billboards, your friends/family, etc. It's a trade-off I'll take.
    - 1morepassword 13y ago
      We're living in 2013, and this is a tech forum, so let's get real: advertising is about tracking, about total surveillance, not sticking a logo on a bus. That's what Google does, that's what Google's motives are. Every damn time, so there is no reason to assume this is any different. That's not a "trade-off", that is surrendering. If the government would set up a balloon network to track everyone you would be screaming bloody murder, but it's Google and people get internet access in exchange it's okay?
      - speeq 13y ago
        It's okay if I agree to it. I'd rather see ads than pay for all the services Google provides to me free of charge (money). I don't and I'd never agree that a government tracks me. For me, that's a big difference. If a company uses their profit (e.g. from ads) to provide and finance something as extremely useful and important as free internet access to developing countries - then yes, that's totally fine for me. Yes this is a forum, people have their own personal opinion.
Mithrandir 13y ago
I took a screenshot of one of the videos: http://i.imgur.com/nppgVPG.jpg http://i.imgur.com/nppgVPG.jpg Perhaps Iridium refers to the Iridium satellite constellation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellatio...) (Edit: or maybe one of their products http://www.iridium.com/Products.aspx http://www.iridium.com/Products.aspx) and "SBD service" refers to something like this: http://www.iridium.com/products/IridiumSBD.aspx?section=support http://www.iridium.com/products/IridiumSBD.aspx?section=supp... ? Edit 2: Perhaps they were tracking the balloon?
- nowarninglabel 13y ago
  It would likely not use the Iridium satellites, they are bandwidth constrained, quite slow (due to roundtrip distance) and very expensive. It also wouldn't be offering much advantage over connecting to the satellite directly asides from that I guess you could connect via normal wi-fi perhaps as opposed to needing a satellite receiver on the ground. Perhaps they could be using one of their products though. At least, that's what my experience working with Iridium satellite systems would lead me to believe.
- wmf 13y ago
  Iridium is the ultimate backup connectivity (for balloon control, not for data). It's very slow and very expensive, but works everywhere and requires a small antenna.
- bcn 13y ago
  It looks like they're using the short burst data (SBD) service to 'control' the balloons. (Email) : SENT : B1 > power on rocket RESPONSE : B0 > SUCCESS(0) RESPONSE : B1 > SUCCESS(0)
- espadrine 13y ago
  Looking at the solar information (on the left), power doesn't look too good. Would these balloons still work during the night? Would they need to stay in the day? Would that even be possible, given the speed of the wind?
kayoone 13y ago
April 1st? Hm no, awesome!
melloclello 13y ago
I think it would be nice for there to be some reserved places on the Earth's surface which can remain undisturbed by the internet. Soon, you're going to need a boat just to escape its corrupting influence. PS If I was a Cantabrian farmer and I saw one of these above my property I'd have my shotgun out, quick as.
- veemjeem 13y ago
  You'd probably need a missile to shoot it down. The balloons are probably 80,000ft above ground. I'm not sure if there's anything that can shoot a bullet that high. Maybe a high powered railgun?
  - melloclello 13y ago
    What about a maser?
  - sicxu 13y ago
    You can use another "attacker" balloon to do it.
    - veemjeem 13y ago
      There are probably many ways to shoot down the balloon, but it's probably out of the technological reach of a farmer. I don't think there's anything off the shelf that could shoot something down from 80,000ft.
- aptwebapps 13y ago
  You don't own the airspace over your land in most countries. I doubt NZ is that different.
confluence 13y ago
Obviously very cool (but not without precedent). The things I'm wondering about is cost and resilience. What do they cost? And could bad actors bring them down with lasers?
- Sven7 13y ago
  As long as they cost less than putting up cell phone towers in the middle of nowhere, its all good. Idk but I don't imagine cell phone towers cover a 40km radius. Telco's have no great incentive to do this so kudos to Google. And as Larry Page said, stop already with the obvious negativity. Bad actors can bring down cell phone towers too. And who cares about precedents.
  - riffraff 13y ago
    AFAIR the GSM radius was about that (35-40km) I imagine more recent technologies may have some more. But of course this suffers a lot from topography.
    - Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
      There's reason why they extended it (Enhanced Extended Range). It was only technical limit due TDMA timing advance. It had nothing to do with the actual signal reception strength / transmission power required. So in 800 MHz range 120 kilometers should be well achievable with 2 W transmitter. "GSM has a fixed maximum cell site range of 120 km, which is imposed by technical limitations. This is expanded from the old limit of 35 km."
  - corin_ 13y ago
    > Bad actors can bring down cell phone towers too. That doesn't mean there aren't relevant lines of debate about the ease of bringing them down.
- throwaway10001 13y ago
  Google bought them? They have been doing it since 2008, at least http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120347353988378955.html?mod=blog http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120347353988378955.ht...
cclogg 13y ago
Is New Zealand now the test-zone for everything? App betas, and now this project lol.
- steveh73 13y ago
  It's a small, english-speaking country, relatively isolated in space and time from the primary markets.
salimmadjd 13y ago
If there ever was any justification of using up our limited helium is this one. However, I wish for these types of projects they would use hydrogen instead. I understand the safety concern, but a century after Hindenburg, we should be able to make these safer. At least for non-human flights. Not to mention Hydrogen is a bit better in creating lift.
- Filligree 13y ago
  The solution is, of course, for Google to build lunar fusion reactors to make helium and power the Earth.
  - 3825 13y ago
    We need a cheaper way to move freight between the Earth and the Moon first. I believe here is what Filligree is talking about if anyone else is curious. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3 > Materials on the Moon's surface contain helium-3 at concentrations on the order of between 1.4 and 15 ppb in sunlit areas, and may contain concentrations as much as 50 ppb in permanently shadowed regions. A number of people, starting with Gerald Kulcinski in 1986, have proposed to explore the moon, mine lunar regolith and use the helium-3 for fusion. Recently, companies as Planetary Resources have also stated to be interested in mining helium-3 on the moon. Because of the low concentrations of helium-3, any mining equipment would need to process extremely large amounts of regolith (over 150 million tonnes of regolith to obtain one ton of helium 3), and some proposals have suggested that helium-3 extraction be piggybacked onto a larger mining and development operation. (removed citation notes for readability)
speeq 13y ago
You know what would be awesome? If they'd open-source the technology behind these balloons - so that we could build and launch our own! My relatives live in a tiny village on the south coast of India and whenever I visit them I have to use the extremely slow 2G network. I tether my Android phone and basically setup a little WLAN hotspot there. The next bigger city with fast internet connectivity and 3G coverage is almost an hour bus drive away. Every student in the village now possesses a laptop with WLAN capabilities. They got them for free - basically as a bribe so that the villagers stop protesting against the construction of a nuclear power plant the government is building nearby: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koodankulam_Nuclear_Power_Plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koodankulam_Nuclear_Power_Plant But that's another issue. I would love to build a wireless mesh network using cheap routers with an open-source firmware like OpenWRT for these kids. Internet connectivity could be achieved by using a single uplink antenna to Project Loon. Speaking for myself, I had the privilege - unlike most of my family - to grow up in Europe and believe me, having access to the Internet completely changed my life. I’ve had access to free resources, taught myself how to program and I am now making a living out of it. I want anyone on this planet to have full, free, uncensored and fast access to the Internet. Thank you Google for doing such a project! I really hope it will work as planned and I wish you all the best on this journey.
pstuart 13y ago
This combined with Tor could be interesting....
Ecko 13y ago
So will satellite things will get blocked due to these balloon s ??
- wmf 13y ago
  I would guess not. They're on a different frequency and their cross-section is almost nothing. It's probably no worse than a large bird flying in front of your dish.
bionerd 13y ago
This is, without any doubt, the most incredible thing I've seen for the past 15 years I'm the citizen of the internet. The scope of this plan and its possibilities are just amazing. Sadly, my enthusiasm is quite clouded in the light of recent events involing the whole NSA/PRISM thing but then... it's governments that are the problem, not Google. I sincerely hope that this will change the world for the better and not the worse.
yalogin 13y ago
Another cool part about this is the balloons will be floating at twice the height of commercial flights. That would mean commercial flights could get internet through these as well. Commercial airliners travel at 30-40k feet. Twice that would be very high. Won't the service be sluggish and slow because of that?
- unwind 13y ago
  Google says: (80 000 feet) / the speed of light = 81.336269 microseconds So no, that's not a very big amount of latency. Not to be confused with the latency you get to satellites, which is much much larger due to them being way further out.
DigitalSea 13y ago
I find this to be really clever and it kind of reminds me of The Pirate Bay's plans to build servers that actually float above the ocean to prevent being taken down. People laughed at The Pirate Bay for the ridiculousness of the idea, but here Google is essentially proving it's not a pipe-dream and bandwidth capable balloons can one day be a reality.
gvb 13y ago
Anyone know (and able to tell) what radios, frequencies, and antennas are being used for the experiments? The antenna balls on the houses are interesting - I'm guessing there is an actively pointed directional antenna inside.
jedanbik 13y ago
Why don't they focus their energy on making satellite access more affordable? Looks like Google is trying to make its own emerging niche demographic to profit from. You've got to be kidding yourself if you think a floating balloon has anything to do with sustainable, lasting infrastructure. Balloons are cheap, and that's the end of the story. Another thing: satellites don’t pop.

189 points by cleverjake 13y ago

mh- 13y ago

their acquisition[1] of Makani and their "airborne wind turbine" tech suddenly makes more sense to me. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/22/google-x-acquires-makani-power-and-its-airborne-wind-turbines/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/22/google-x-acquires-makani-po...

mdturnerphys 13y ago
I thought the same thing a few weeks ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5776908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5776908
riffraff 13y ago
I may be wrong, but I believe all the high-altitude-wind-energy thingies work by having the flying bit tethered to the ground, while this baloons seem to fly much higher, making the two seem incompatible to me.
- mh- 13y ago
  you're not wrong- the airborne turbines are operable tethered to the ground. but, there previously wasn't much value to Makani in exploring untethered solutions; they needed transmission lines going back to the surface, anyway. I don't believe Google intends to use the two technologies together directly. there's just more synergy here than it may appear, on the surface.

anigbrowl 13y ago

It's all a plot to monitor everyone all the time. Naturally, I think it's awesome.

leoc 13y ago
It's not hard to imagine some political tensions if these things are supposed to do a full circuit of the Earth on a given latitude. It's true that balloons in the stratosphere have a lot in common with satellites in orbit, but that may not be enough to stop people getting annoyed.

jervisfm 13y ago

I am impressed with both the ambitiousness and nobleness of the project that Google is pursuing here. It's true: most of the world's population is not actually online despite how it might feel otherwise to most people who are already online. I am glad that they are working on important issues like this and I hope the project is successful in bringing more of the world's people online.

atirip 13y ago
What are you celebrating about? What they do is deliver advertising, nothing more, nothing less - ADVERTISING.
- bitsoda 13y ago
  Oh no, a company is building out a network of Internet-connected balloons, but I might have to look at some text advertising links. The horror. You see ads everywhere, t-shirts, bus stops, billboards, your friends/family, etc. It's a trade-off I'll take.
  - 1morepassword 13y ago
    We're living in 2013, and this is a tech forum, so let's get real: advertising is about tracking, about total surveillance, not sticking a logo on a bus. That's what Google does, that's what Google's motives are. Every damn time, so there is no reason to assume this is any different. That's not a "trade-off", that is surrendering. If the government would set up a balloon network to track everyone you would be screaming bloody murder, but it's Google and people get internet access in exchange it's okay?
    - speeq 13y ago
      It's okay if I agree to it. I'd rather see ads than pay for all the services Google provides to me free of charge (money). I don't and I'd never agree that a government tracks me. For me, that's a big difference. If a company uses their profit (e.g. from ads) to provide and finance something as extremely useful and important as free internet access to developing countries - then yes, that's totally fine for me. Yes this is a forum, people have their own personal opinion.

Mithrandir 13y ago

I took a screenshot of one of the videos: http://i.imgur.com/nppgVPG.jpg http://i.imgur.com/nppgVPG.jpg Perhaps Iridium refers to the Iridium satellite constellation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellatio...) (Edit: or maybe one of their products http://www.iridium.com/Products.aspx http://www.iridium.com/Products.aspx) and "SBD service" refers to something like this: http://www.iridium.com/products/IridiumSBD.aspx?section=support http://www.iridium.com/products/IridiumSBD.aspx?section=supp... ? Edit 2: Perhaps they were tracking the balloon?

nowarninglabel 13y ago
It would likely not use the Iridium satellites, they are bandwidth constrained, quite slow (due to roundtrip distance) and very expensive. It also wouldn't be offering much advantage over connecting to the satellite directly asides from that I guess you could connect via normal wi-fi perhaps as opposed to needing a satellite receiver on the ground. Perhaps they could be using one of their products though. At least, that's what my experience working with Iridium satellite systems would lead me to believe.
wmf 13y ago
Iridium is the ultimate backup connectivity (for balloon control, not for data). It's very slow and very expensive, but works everywhere and requires a small antenna.
bcn 13y ago
It looks like they're using the short burst data (SBD) service to 'control' the balloons. (Email) : SENT : B1 > power on rocket RESPONSE : B0 > SUCCESS(0) RESPONSE : B1 > SUCCESS(0)
espadrine 13y ago
Looking at the solar information (on the left), power doesn't look too good. Would these balloons still work during the night? Would they need to stay in the day? Would that even be possible, given the speed of the wind?

kayoone 13y ago

April 1st? Hm no, awesome!

melloclello 13y ago

I think it would be nice for there to be some reserved places on the Earth's surface which can remain undisturbed by the internet. Soon, you're going to need a boat just to escape its corrupting influence. PS If I was a Cantabrian farmer and I saw one of these above my property I'd have my shotgun out, quick as.

veemjeem 13y ago
You'd probably need a missile to shoot it down. The balloons are probably 80,000ft above ground. I'm not sure if there's anything that can shoot a bullet that high. Maybe a high powered railgun?
- melloclello 13y ago
  What about a maser?
- sicxu 13y ago
  You can use another "attacker" balloon to do it.
  - veemjeem 13y ago
    There are probably many ways to shoot down the balloon, but it's probably out of the technological reach of a farmer. I don't think there's anything off the shelf that could shoot something down from 80,000ft.
aptwebapps 13y ago
You don't own the airspace over your land in most countries. I doubt NZ is that different.

confluence 13y ago

Obviously very cool (but not without precedent). The things I'm wondering about is cost and resilience. What do they cost? And could bad actors bring them down with lasers?

Sven7 13y ago
As long as they cost less than putting up cell phone towers in the middle of nowhere, its all good. Idk but I don't imagine cell phone towers cover a 40km radius. Telco's have no great incentive to do this so kudos to Google. And as Larry Page said, stop already with the obvious negativity. Bad actors can bring down cell phone towers too. And who cares about precedents.
- riffraff 13y ago
  AFAIR the GSM radius was about that (35-40km) I imagine more recent technologies may have some more. But of course this suffers a lot from topography.
  - Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
    There's reason why they extended it (Enhanced Extended Range). It was only technical limit due TDMA timing advance. It had nothing to do with the actual signal reception strength / transmission power required. So in 800 MHz range 120 kilometers should be well achievable with 2 W transmitter. "GSM has a fixed maximum cell site range of 120 km, which is imposed by technical limitations. This is expanded from the old limit of 35 km."
- corin_ 13y ago
  > Bad actors can bring down cell phone towers too. That doesn't mean there aren't relevant lines of debate about the ease of bringing them down.
throwaway10001 13y ago
Google bought them? They have been doing it since 2008, at least http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120347353988378955.html?mod=blog http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120347353988378955.ht...

cclogg 13y ago

Is New Zealand now the test-zone for everything? App betas, and now this project lol.

steveh73 13y ago
It's a small, english-speaking country, relatively isolated in space and time from the primary markets.

salimmadjd 13y ago

If there ever was any justification of using up our limited helium is this one. However, I wish for these types of projects they would use hydrogen instead. I understand the safety concern, but a century after Hindenburg, we should be able to make these safer. At least for non-human flights. Not to mention Hydrogen is a bit better in creating lift.

Filligree 13y ago
The solution is, of course, for Google to build lunar fusion reactors to make helium and power the Earth.
- 3825 13y ago
  We need a cheaper way to move freight between the Earth and the Moon first. I believe here is what Filligree is talking about if anyone else is curious. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3 > Materials on the Moon's surface contain helium-3 at concentrations on the order of between 1.4 and 15 ppb in sunlit areas, and may contain concentrations as much as 50 ppb in permanently shadowed regions. A number of people, starting with Gerald Kulcinski in 1986, have proposed to explore the moon, mine lunar regolith and use the helium-3 for fusion. Recently, companies as Planetary Resources have also stated to be interested in mining helium-3 on the moon. Because of the low concentrations of helium-3, any mining equipment would need to process extremely large amounts of regolith (over 150 million tonnes of regolith to obtain one ton of helium 3), and some proposals have suggested that helium-3 extraction be piggybacked onto a larger mining and development operation. (removed citation notes for readability)

speeq 13y ago

You know what would be awesome? If they'd open-source the technology behind these balloons - so that we could build and launch our own! My relatives live in a tiny village on the south coast of India and whenever I visit them I have to use the extremely slow 2G network. I tether my Android phone and basically setup a little WLAN hotspot there. The next bigger city with fast internet connectivity and 3G coverage is almost an hour bus drive away. Every student in the village now possesses a laptop with WLAN capabilities. They got them for free - basically as a bribe so that the villagers stop protesting against the construction of a nuclear power plant the government is building nearby: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koodankulam_Nuclear_Power_Plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koodankulam_Nuclear_Power_Plant But that's another issue. I would love to build a wireless mesh network using cheap routers with an open-source firmware like OpenWRT for these kids. Internet connectivity could be achieved by using a single uplink antenna to Project Loon. Speaking for myself, I had the privilege - unlike most of my family - to grow up in Europe and believe me, having access to the Internet completely changed my life. I’ve had access to free resources, taught myself how to program and I am now making a living out of it. I want anyone on this planet to have full, free, uncensored and fast access to the Internet. Thank you Google for doing such a project! I really hope it will work as planned and I wish you all the best on this journey.

pstuart 13y ago

This combined with Tor could be interesting....

Ecko 13y ago

So will satellite things will get blocked due to these balloon s ??

wmf 13y ago
I would guess not. They're on a different frequency and their cross-section is almost nothing. It's probably no worse than a large bird flying in front of your dish.

bionerd 13y ago

This is, without any doubt, the most incredible thing I've seen for the past 15 years I'm the citizen of the internet. The scope of this plan and its possibilities are just amazing. Sadly, my enthusiasm is quite clouded in the light of recent events involing the whole NSA/PRISM thing but then... it's governments that are the problem, not Google. I sincerely hope that this will change the world for the better and not the worse.

yalogin 13y ago

Another cool part about this is the balloons will be floating at twice the height of commercial flights. That would mean commercial flights could get internet through these as well. Commercial airliners travel at 30-40k feet. Twice that would be very high. Won't the service be sluggish and slow because of that?

unwind 13y ago
Google says: (80 000 feet) / the speed of light = 81.336269 microseconds So no, that's not a very big amount of latency. Not to be confused with the latency you get to satellites, which is much much larger due to them being way further out.

DigitalSea 13y ago

I find this to be really clever and it kind of reminds me of The Pirate Bay's plans to build servers that actually float above the ocean to prevent being taken down. People laughed at The Pirate Bay for the ridiculousness of the idea, but here Google is essentially proving it's not a pipe-dream and bandwidth capable balloons can one day be a reality.

gvb 13y ago

Anyone know (and able to tell) what radios, frequencies, and antennas are being used for the experiments? The antenna balls on the houses are interesting - I'm guessing there is an actively pointed directional antenna inside.

jedanbik 13y ago

Why don't they focus their energy on making satellite access more affordable? Looks like Google is trying to make its own emerging niche demographic to profit from. You've got to be kidding yourself if you think a floating balloon has anything to do with sustainable, lasting infrastructure. Balloons are cheap, and that's the end of the story. Another thing: satellites don’t pop.