Google’s most ambitious idea yet, Project Loon, will begin in December this year with Australia as the first country partaking.
Project Loon is Google’s greatest endeavor yet, as it aims to bring Internet to the entire world via a series of relays located in high-altitude balloons. The Santa Clara company has announced that they are getting ready to conduct a series of test flights in Australia, with more than 20 balloons spread around western Queensland. Google couldn’t do this on their own, so they have partnered with a local wireless carrier, Telstra, who will be in charge of beaming the Internet to the ground below. Note, Telstra are not newbies when it comes to Internet telecommunications, and are already Australia’s largest carrier.
The plan comes from Google’s experimentation and research department, Google X, and has already been running trials in other countries, such as New Zealand and the US. Project Loon sounds fantastic on paper, but Google still has to get around some details, mainly the wind and ever-changing weather conditions which could potentially interfere with the optimal altitude, or worse, crash the balloons as it already happened in New Zealand once.
Via The Verge
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