Project Loon is an effort Google is making to evaluate whether it is possible to provide Internet access using free-floating balloons that will drift with the wind west to east south of the equator.Given a sufficiently large fleet of balloons with a bit of maneuverability, Google wants to understand whether such balloons can be used to provide low-cost Internet access to hundreds of millions, if not a billion people in the southern hemisphere.
Recently, Project Loon says, it has been conducting research flights in California’s Central Valley, testing power systems (solar panel orientation and batteries), envelope design, and radio configuration.
"On our most recent research flight we overflew Fresno, a nearby city, to get statistics on how the presence of lots of other radio signals (signal-noise) in cities affects our ability to transmit Internet," Project Loon says.
"It turns out that providing Internet access to a busy city is hard because there are already many other radio signals around, and the balloons’ antennas pick up a lot of that extra noise," Project Loon staffers say.
This increases the error-rate in decoding the Loon signal, so the signal has to be transmitted multiple times, decreasing the effective bandwidth.
That is just one of the practical issues Project Loon has to overcome. At a completely different level, there is the issue of how nations might react to balloons overflying airspace. Project Loons do not orbit in space, and neither do they fly as high as airliners.
But that might raise some sovereignty issues. Not every national government truly wants its people to have unfettered access to information.
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