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.”
Image sourced from MIT Technology Review
Alphabet is shutting down its balloon-powered mobile Internet service, Loon. The project’s main objective was to bring abundant, affordable Internet access to unconnected communities around the world.
“When we unveiled Loon in June 2013, we meant everything in its name. It was a way-out-there and risky venture,” says Astro Teller, X lead.
“Sadly, despite the team’s groundbreaking technical achievements over the last 9 years doing many things previously thought impossible 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.”
Alphabet Shutting Down Loon, Its Balloon-Based Internet Alternative to Cell Towers
Loon aimed to bring connectivity to areas of the world where building cell towers is too expensive or treacherous by using balloons. By Reuters | Updated: 22 January 2021 10:18 IST
Photo Credit: Medium
Highlights
Among challenges were that a carrier would need several balloons at once
The company employed 200 people as of 2019
Google parent Alphabet is shutting down its Internet balloon business, Loon, which aimed to provide a less expensive alternative to cell towers, saying on Thursday that the road to commercial viability has proven much longer and riskier than hoped.
Founded in 2011, Loon aimed to bring connectivity to areas of the world where building cell towers is too expensive or treacherous by using balloons the length of tennis courts to float solar-powered networking gear high above the Earth. But the wireless carriers that Loon saw as buyers of it
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Alphabet, Google’s parent company has announced that it is ending Loon, its experimental project that sought to use giant, high-altitude balloons to beam internet connectivity to hard-to-reach, underserved communities around the world. In the end, Alphabet found that the costs of the 9-year project got in the way of its commercial viability.
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The project, which received a lot of attention at its inception, had been parked under X, Alphabet’s vehicle for experimental projects. Regarding Loon, X CEO
Astro Teller praised its groundbreaking achievements, but also wrote that “the road to commercial viability has proven much longer and riskier than hoped.”