Google’s Project Loon (steerable balloons to provider Internet access) appears to be making order of magnitude advances in performance, including 10 times more bandwidth, 10 times better abiltity to steer the balloons and 10 times the time afloft.
Should those sorts of advances continue, odds of a commercial launch would improve beyond the "greater than 50 percent" range Loon currently is said to enjoy.
One key element is likely to be communications using the Long Term Evolution air interface, rather than Wi-Fi. The reason is that a Loon network would allow mobile service providers to access signals, eliminating the need for special base stations.
Recent Loon tests have shown ability to delivery speeds up to 22 Mbps at a base station and 5 Mbps to a phone.
Monday, June 16, 2014
LTE May Make the Difference for Google's Hope to Commercialize "Loon"
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
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