January 22nd, 2021
Loon
In 2013 Google shocked us by announcing Project Loon, an effort to distribute wireless connections from balloons floating 20km above the Earth. Now, as first reported by
Wired, Google’s parent company Alphabet is pulling the plug on it, apparently because it couldn’t make the whole thing commercially viable. Loon CEO Alistair Westgarth writes in a blog post that “While we’ve found a number of willing partners along the way, we haven’t found a way to get the costs low enough to build a long-term, sustainable business.”
In 2018, Loon (along with the Wing delivery drones) moved up from X moonshot projects to full-fledged divisions within Alphabet. But now X CEO and Loon chairman Astro Teller writes “despite the team’s groundbreaking technical achievements over the last 9 years, the road to commercial viability has proven much longer and riskier than hoped.”
Loon s final flight on January 22, 2021, 12:16
Bottom line: Loon, the Alphabet subsidiary tasked with bringing Internet access to some of the most remote parts of the world, is shutting down. The project was risky from the get go and ultimately, the team wasn t able to figure out how to make it a commercially viable venture.
Project Loon, as it was originally called, started as a research and development project under Google X back in 2011. With it, Google and parent company Alphabet used high-altitude balloons to create makeshift wireless networks to blanket remote regions with Internet access.
In 2018, the project was spun off as a separate company called Loon LLC.