Daniel Adeyemi
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A year after Google’s Moonshot Factory celebrated its first decade, it’s shutting down one of its projects: Loon.
Launched in 2013, the project Loon is a cost-effective solution to the difficult challenge of bringing internet access to people in underserved remote areas. But two years after making it a separate division, Google has accepted that it can’t find a sustainable business model.
Loon launch in Kenya
Last year, Loon launched a pilot project in Kenya, years behind schedule after regulatory delays.
Initially, some technology experts said the balloons would be better deployed elsewhere because 39 million out of 48 million people in Kenya were already connected to the internet, more than many other countries in the developing world. But Loon’s response was that they had chosen Kenya because of its openness to adopting new technologies.