Google to float balloons for Internet access to whole world

BANGALORE, INDIA: For two out of three people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still a distant dream.

It is on this premise that Google is working on currently - with Project Loon that will assure balloon-powered Internet access to remote locations on Earth. "There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity-jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income," wrote Mike Cassidy, project lead, on Google's official blog.

"So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google: balloon-powered Internet access," he added.

"We believe that it might actually be possible to build a ring of balloons, flying around the globe on the stratospheric winds, that provides Internet access to the earth below. It's very early days, but weve built a system that uses balloons, carried by the wind at altitudes twice as high as commercial planes, to beam Internet access to the ground at speeds similar to today's 3G networks or faster."

As a result, Cassidy went on, we hope balloons could become an option for connecting rural, remote, and underserved areas, and for helping with communications after natural disasters. "The idea may sound a bit crazy - and thats part of the reason we're calling it Project Loon - but there's solid science behind it."

He says to tide over the cost and other complexities, they had to figure out how to control the paths of balloons through the sky. "We've now found a way to do that, using just wind and solar power: we can move the balloons up or down to catch the winds we want them to travel in. That solution then led us to a new problem: how to manage a fleet of balloons sailing around the world so that each balloon is in the area you want it right when you need it. We're solving this with some complex algorithms and lots of computing power."

In order to test the concept, it has launched a pilot program in the Canterbury area of New Zealand with 50 testers trying to connect to our balloons.

You can follow the Google+ page of Project Loon to get further updates on the ambitious project.