New internet revolution in offing with Google’s Loon

The Indian government's practice of filling its coffers by auctioning overpriced radio spectrum may perforce become a thing of the past, if Google's Project Loon seriously takes off.

The much-awaited Project Loon is now closer to an official launch, having been in the works for some years now. It is an initiative to launch balloons in the sky with internet-enabled circuitry to provide internet access in remote areas.

Google has posted a video on Project Loon's Google+ page hinting at scaling up the project to launch it in many more countries.

Project Loon uses balloons that travel 20 km above the earth. Using software algorithms, Loon determines where the balloon needs to go depending upon the wind.

It started as a pilot project in New Zealand where 30 balloons were launched. Last year in November, Google announced that Project Loon has the ability to launch up to 20 balloons per day.

According to the Google+ post, this is possible because the autofill equipment has been improved and the time to fill the balloon had come down to under 5 minutes.

The balloons can now last up to 10 times longer in the stratosphere than they did in 2013, and a lot of them have lasted over 100 days – with 130 days being a record, Google said.

Google is carrying out trials with cellular operators in Australia, Latin America and New Zealand.

Project leader Mike Cassidy says, ''The goal of Project Loon is to bring internet to almost 2 out of 3 people in the world who don't have internet access today.''

In the video, Cassidy talks about increasing capacity of manufacturing the balloons, about mission control system to keep track of the balloons and about the different kind of teams associated with the project. He touches up on the challenges such as durability of the balloons and scaling up the project to different countries.

The number of days that the balloons can stay in the air has increased to 100 days. Also the process of taping the balloon used to take 3 to 4 days initially, but now with Google's in-house manufacturing unit, it takes a few hours to complete taping on one balloon says Cassidy. While launching the balloons was a manual job initially, now Google can launch balloons via automated cranes and dozens of balloons can be launched in a day using these cranes.

Google has partnered with telecom service providers in test countries to provide LTE cellular coverage. The idea is to connect every remote corner of the world and Project Loon engineers track the balloon right from the time it is launched to the time it is in the air to the time it is taken down. The coverage areas are also neatly divided so as to ensure the reach of the connectivity isn't hampered.

According to a news report in February in The Times of India, Google was in talks with the Indian government to introduce Project Loon in India. Mohammad Gawdat, VP of business Innovation at Google X told the news site that the company planned to launch a commercial format that would allow coverage on ''every square inch'' on earth by 2016. He also said that the company was working closely' with telecom firms and governments across the world to achieve this.