Google loon to provide Sri Lanka with internet

YEREVAN, July 31. /ARKA/. Project Loon, Google’s stratospheric internet access project, has signed its first national agreement with the government of Sri Lanka, making the small tropical island nation a frontrunner in the race to offer countrywide WiFi access from giant helium-filled balloons, The Financial Times reports. 

Launched in 2013, Project Loon is an ambitious plan to encircle the Earth with a chain of balloons floating high in the atmosphere which link together to form a network that gives internet access to remote and rural areas.

On Thursday, Google spokesman Taj Meadows confirmed that the US-based company had signed a memorandum of understanding with Sri Lanka’s government, which he said was an “important early step” for the project “but it’s still very, very early days”.

Project Loon is one of the most high-profile among several so-called “moon shot” projects developed by the company’s secretive Google X laboratory, ranging from solar-powered drones to self-driving cars.
The balloon-powered internet plan hopes to provide internet access at speeds close to third-generation mobile phones, although it faces far-reaching technical obstacles, including navigating its balloons in wind currents towards the edge of the earth's atmosphere. 

According to The Financial Times, Project Loon has also pitched Google into a high-altitude contest with Facebook — which is developing its own plans involving networks of flying drones, satellites and lasers — to see which American tech giant can first provide blanket internet coverage across large swaths of the planet.

Project Loon took off with an initial test in New Zealand in 2013, with the ultimate goal of providing internet access to a range of southern hemisphere nations. --0--

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14:02 07/31/2015