グーグルが追いかけた 気球インターネット の夢は終われど、それは決して「失敗」とは呼ばれない wired.jp - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from wired.jp Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
January 25, 2021
Loon, Google parent Alphabet’s ambitious project to provide internet access to underserved areas through balloons carrying radio equipment, has been shuttered, the company announced in a blog post on January 22nd. Astro Teller, who heads Moonshots at X, the Alphabet subsidiary in charge of such emerging technology, said:
Sadly, despite the team’s groundbreaking technical achievements over the last 9 years doing many things previously thought impossible, like precisely navigating balloons in the stratosphere, creating a mesh network in the sky, or developing balloons that can withstand the harsh conditions of the stratosphere for more than a year the road to commercial viability has proven much longer and riskier than hoped. So we’ve made the difficult decision to close down Loon. In the coming months, we’ll begin winding down operations and it will no longer be an Other Bet within Alphabet.
Project Loon is to be scrapped. The nine year-old Google project to beam internet from balloons is being closed down in the face of little interest from go
Alphabet has announced that it is shutting down its balloon-powered mobile Internet service, Loon in Kenya.
The project was launched in Kenya in 2018 in partnership with Telkom Kenya and sought to enable internet access to remote areas where setting up the traditional infrastructure is difficult or economically unviable. By last year, the project had however not kicked off over regulatory issues.
ICT Cabinet Secretary Joe Mucheru cited the laggard nature of Kenya’s bureaucracy process as the major hindrance.
The ambitious project, however, went live in July last year. The project was given a green light by the government in March after schools shutdown and movement was restricted in and out of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi due to the coronavirus pandemic.