This perspective made me laugh and earned my honest upvote; especially because it sheds a different light on Google Glass (about which I have pretty negative feelings).
"I love those who yearn for the impossible." -Goethe
I wish other large companies showed such ambition. Telecoms like AT&T can't even be bothered to roll out the network upgrades they promised in the early 2000's.
Most large companies don't have the financial flexibility that Google's near-monopoly on search offers. Lots of ten-billion per year in revenue companies are eking out 5% margins in extremely competitive fields and can't afford to be distracted by ambitious projects. AT&T is locked in tight competition with Verizon in a very capital-intensive market, and can't afford to divert capital to blue-sky projects.
Back when AT&T was a monopoly, we did see innovative projects like this come out of them. At the turn of the century, linking everyone in the U.S. with phone lines was a pretty blue-sky project. The AT&T phone network was a marvel of engineering of the time. And of course Bell Labs gave us tons of innovations.
That's the beautiful thing about being in a market where you're not scraping around in the dirt trying to claw out the eyes of your competitors.
That's pretty weak defense of AT&T. They have 250,000+ employees. They spent half a billion dollors in alternative fuel vehicles investments in 2011 alone. They have 20B of total capital investment a year. Blue sky projects such as Loon typically takes couple of dozen employees and may be few million dollars to kick off - small enough to be rounding errors in AT&T's budgets. If I have to imagine, the reason AT&T doesn't do this is probably because (1) their leadership has lost habits of innovative/creative envisioning (2) their leadership probably laughed this off because potential for revenue from people in Sahara was not very tempting (3) Their middle management is not empowered or willing enough to paddle such ideas to top in the first place (4) They simply doesn't have setup where bottom-up vision is possible anymore so unless leadership envisions it and executes, it doesn't get done.
The lack of money and employees is probably the last thing that would prevent AT&T to do these kind of projects.
This financial flexibility certainly helps, but Google is hardly the only tech company with loads of cash. Consider Apple. They have famously high margins and insane cash reserves, projected to grow beyond $170 billion in 2013[1]. And to caricature a bit, they are dead focused on creating the most comfortable sofa browsing experience for rich people. This focus is good, it yields amazing products, but I do give Google credit for investing in such a crazy project as Loon, with the potential to benefit the poorest regions of the world.
For most organizations the task of running these sort of experiments will easily come at a chicken feed cost.
However the real problem is really amidst all red tape, most middle management can't tolerate smart engineers. It threatens them, they feel insecure that smart people will ultimately replace them.
There fore they make all attempts to stop anything big from ever happening. Running daily affairs as usual is OK. Its in their interest to keep rewards, motivation and level of work such that their positions are safe.
Minor nitpick: The company now known as AT&T is essentially Cingular wireless; they bought the remnants of AT&Ts cell network and the rights to the name.
Actually that is the company now known as AT&T Wireless. The company now known as AT&T was one of the 24 'Baby Bells' that were created when antitrust regulators broke up AT&T (the one that created Bell Labs) in 1984.
The company used to be known as SBC Communications but changed it's name to AT&T after acquiring what was left of AT&T (mostly long-distance phone services) in 2005.
Through a long series of acquisitions AT&T now owns 11/24 Baby Bells.
[2]My grandfather worked for AT&T for his entire career and I've involuntarily listened to a minimum of 100 hours of company history throughout my life.
Doesn't say that on Wikipedia, did I miss something? Looks to me like they're just shifting Bell Labs' focus from basic scientific research and focusing all research into computer science aspects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#2000s
Bell Labs is long gone, and existed to appease the government about a monopoly.
This is about BIG thinking enabled by the unique org structure. Everything about corporate governance says this is a bad structure. But they still might pull this greatness off!
How long does a 100k+ employee company get credit for something a small handful of their employees did almost half a century ago? Not that C wasn't an achievement but . . .
The old monopoly AT&T wasn't just a company but presented itself as an American institution. They heavily publicized their Bell Labs inventions to help keep the anti-trust regulators off their back. Unix/C certainly benefited from this.
I take my point back as the AT&T of today is not the same as it was back then, but the fact that the company funded this research is what makes it admirable.
AT&T was planning to connect every home in America with fiber by the year 2000. Then they were broken up and the project was impossible to complete. The current AT&T is nothing like the old one. It's not even fair to compare them
Google deserves a lot fo credit but let's give something to Jerry Knoblach and his team:
"His plan: Beam it down from balloons hovering at the edge of space.
This isn't just hot air. His company, Space Data Corp., already launches 10 balloons a day across the Southern U.S., providing specialized telecom services to truckers and oil companies. His balloons soar 20 miles into the stratosphere, each carrying a shoebox-size payload of electronics that acts like a mini cellphone "tower" covering thousands of square miles below.
His idea has caught the eye of Google Inc., GOOG -0.22% according to people familiar with the matter. The Internet giant -- which is now pushing into wireless services -- has considered contracting with Space Data or even buying the firm, according to one person."
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120347353988378955.ht...
"I love those who yearn for the impossible." -Goethe
Google is taking this global, but I believe they bought the company behind this. They have been working on this for over 10 years!
" But Space Data says its plan to create America's first floating wireless network -- by putting disposable transmitters on government weather balloons -- has already undergone successful testing and is economically viable.
A trial run with text-messaging service in the Phoenix area is slated for this summer. The official launch of the messaging service would begin next spring in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma, extending nationwide by the end of 2003. Cellular phone service could be added a year later if the company secures more funding. "
http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/LIS/archive/wireless-tech/in...
At&T has no incentive, this probably would help new incumbents and they'll hate that. Google is not going to do something that helps a search competitor, so why should AT&T helps theirs?
It's fascinating to see how well Google has branched out. It started as just a search engine competing with Lycos, AltaVista, & Yahoo and yet they didn't just stop, they kept going. They built all these new services & products around their core product (search) and it's paid off tremendously.
It's definitely something to model future companies off of.
Building computer networks and artificial intelligence are pretty much Google's core competencies. Most if not all other companies would struggle to fund and develop this project.
First of all, the system is in total very expensive: You don't get any coverage with just a few baloons, you probably need hundreds to make any of them stay connected to the rest of the internet most of the time.
Second, this system is extremely stochastic and complex. The winds are mildly predictable, so they will have to optimize the balloon paths to cover their userbase.
This is a very exciting problem once you think about it...
> This is a very exciting problem once you think about it...
That's a good summary of why Google has been so successful.
They have a way of making engineers and regular people really excited about their projects. It's a feedback loop - have exciting stuff, recruit smarter people, work on more exciting stuff.
Google has many exciting projects, but those are not responsible for its success. Google's success is owed to comparatively pedestrian products: a search engine and an ad brokerage.
Take away Glass, self driving cars, Loon, and all the other blue sky projects, and you still have a wildly successful company. But take away those two cash cows and Google is broke.
I think you are misunderstanding google. For one thing, search engines and their Ad system is the same class of problem as the Loon project: Large Scale stochastic computation.
On the other hand there is no telling what sorts of massive successes will come out of Google. They will have their stakes in any mass-produced self-driving car, Google Glass is at least going somewhere, and Android is already very popular and enabling Google to get Ad revenue without being fought by Apple every inch of their way.
The stock price and market capitalization is driven both by current revenue but more so by these insane projects and the probability that there will be another big success.
Actually it seems cheap to scale. You need a lot of very very smart software but google have a couple of hundred idling geniuses to spare. And if you change helium with hydrogen (not a big deal if a balloon blows up) - everything else is standard components - i think that if they aim for third world coverage the price of transmission must be cheaper than current wireless. And you got much less regulatory hurdles.
Almost everything they're done is centered around ads and getting more data on their users to sell more ads. Even this project, in the end it's about getting more people online to look at their ads. (not sure how much ad revenue you can get from poor places, but whatever)
EDIT: To those saying they're playing the long game; Playing the long game doesn't make sense. The long game is being fully wired. By the time poor areas become economically important enough to be advertised to, they will have traditional telecoms servicing them.
No, the long game is wireless communications (and renewable energy). One of the reasons for fast growth in some developing countries is the fact that they don't have to make the same investments in infrastructure that developed countries made in the past.
Wireless is a hack, it will never replace wired. Sure, in Africa they get online with mobile phones, but that's only because it's not profitable _yet_ to run landlines. Even 56K would be better than mobile, but since it's Africa they don't even have that.
Give it a few more decades and they'll be wired just like everyone else.
Particularly over long, sparse networks, wired connectivity is not as cost effective as wireless connectivity, even including the cost of pole assets and antenna mounts.
And data rates of > 1 Gigabit for wireless connections are readily achievable these days. [1]
The United States is a long, sparse country, one of the longest, sparsest countries on the globe. We are wired because running backbones over 3G blows.
People say infrastructure is too expensive to build, it's not. When you have a discerning customer base with the purchasing power to demand it, infrastructure is the only way to serve it. Wireless cannot support that. As soon as the developing world stops being developing, in will come the telcos to build real kit.
#1 - The United States is wired for legacy reasons, our infrastructure was built 50+ years ago when wireless voice and data for the most part did not exist.
#2 - When I say "sparse" I'm referring to density of the target population, as in, the number of households per square mile.
It does make sense to run wired connections to dense urban populations, the cost-per-connection, particularly measured on a bandwidth-per-drop-per-dollar basis is great. Also, if you already have cable (either pairs of copper, or coax-for-TV) running to those people's homes, you've got a foundation for delivering data.
For most of the developing world in the next century (excluding the cities), communications, data, and entertainment will be in the form of wireless (Satellite, 3G, or directional 50 GHz+ data drops for backbones).
We won't be running cables to supply communities in the African countryside with high speed Internet. (We also won't be running it over 3G/LTE - which wouldn't be most people's choice for a wireless data backbone these days)
You have no idea what you are talking about. I live in a developing country (bangladesh) which is mostly poor. About 80-90% of internet users are wireless internet users, and every year its getting more dominating.
Wired connection is extremely expensive to deploy and very time consuming too, wireless, not so much. As a matter of fact there is no "nation-wide" wired internet service here, only local providers. New wireless providers are popping up almost every year...
It's a hack for the use case of basic connectivity. Your cell phone connects to a cell tower, which in turn connects to a trunk line. That's the proper way to do wireless.
In the developing world, cell towers connect to other cell towers wirelessly. That's a hack. It's the reason why hotel Internet blows. Not its proper use case, engineering-wise. Service sucks but the customer base isn't discerning enough to notice and wouldn't be able to afford better.
We have Clear Internet service in Atlanta. We had it for awhile, but crappy reception due to trees even though we were well covered by three towers made us go back to cable. Dialup would have been better. I had another friend within eyesight of a tower, he dropped it too because service got so crowded and bad that he couldn't stand it.
Current wireless technology could never replace wired and deliver the same quality of service that wires do. For proof, head down to your local Starbucks and try to get work done. I've not seen one yet where the connection didn't cut out at least once an hour. Radios degrade over time, copper doesn't.
>Sure, in Africa they get online with mobile phones, but that's only because it's not profitable _yet_ to run landlines.
I'm not sure it will be ever be profitable to run landlines.
The big issue being that there wont never be public and private monopolies again and that you dont run a line to a single costumer.
except that anything they do in good faith, could be easily and mechanically turned into more profit by doing something a bit more evil. The pressure to make profit is the driving force, and so the stable norm for any profit making entity is to "turn evil".
He's slightly exaggerating, IIRC, but it's conceptually correct.
Regarding the share structure, Google has two classes of shares, or maybe three by now. Class C shares don't get to vote, and I can't remember if they exist yet (IIRC they were voted into existence a year ago, but only pending various hurdles that I think might not have yet been cleared). Class B shares are worth 10x as much as Class A shares, for voting purposes. Guess who owns most (all?) of the Class B shares.
Anyway, the various share classes are all a bit beside-the-point. The real point is that when you add up all the votes, Larry and Sergey control a lot of them. And then there's Eric. And then there are a few CxOs/SVPs with meaningful shares. So basically a small group of people, who have led Google to its current state, are in control. Other shareholders are just along for the ride.
On top of all that, Google has always warned potential buyers that they don't give a shit about quarterly earnings, and they care about long plays and such, from the IPO forward. If minority shareholders were to sue the company for lack of fiduciary care, I think this would go poorly for them.
You could look up modern SEC filings to have a more-detailed breakdown, but here's a years-out-of-date summary I found with a few minutes use of... you guessed it.
Its the classic News Corp style founder control non-capitalism stock market listing. Other shareholders are not owners, just along for the ride. Illegal in most countries other than the US, where shareholders actually have to own a public company...
Class C shares don't exist yet...they're structured as essentially a stock split, where each class A shareholder gets an equivalent class C share that's non-voting, and so you'll see Google's stock price roughly halve when the transaction goes live.
Between them, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt hold a majority of Google shareholders' voting power (about 2/3 is what I usually hear). I won't link anything because I don't really know the authoritative source for this sort of information, but Googling [Google stock structure] turns up plenty of secondary sources.
Whoa, they'd rather do a thousand as many baloons as whatever amount they're doing now, than that last part of your post. That's, you know, core business.
But think about it...right now they have a random bunch of 10 or so tabs (flights, recipes, patents etc) above the search box. Is that it?
To expand search to its full potential that list has to expand.
What better way to do it than create a marketplace? It would be a good experiment to run a pilot in some small country or city and see what happens. Unlimited API access to google search...any app built on top of that platform that gets X number of hits becomes another tab above your search bar...for a price...or advertisers could make it free cause domain based search can get them better targeting.
There's cynicism on one end and naivety on the other, but there's a whole spread in between. Despite what the cynic thinks, reality is almost always somewhere in the middle there.
It's not like in mid-90's the Internet started getting big and the telecoms started running wires because it was the best option. They based the new network offerings on the infrastructure that had been in place for decades.
Developing areas don't have that existing infrastructure. Perhaps setting up a wired infrastructure will make the most financial sense. However, I don't think that's a foregone conclusion, and a pure wireless infrastructure may be far cheaper and more profitable.
I think the key is that wired networks were ideal in the situation where customers would pay off the investment. Wireless is way cheaper - one station could be 20+ people and take far less investment upfront.
This is not really borne out in the economics. Wireless is only cheaper if you have a big wired trunk line somewhere you can drop a tower on.
It's not cheaper if you have to build that trunk line, and the latency and equipment start getting costly when you're looking at going tower-to-tower over a long distance, since with a single fiber you can run over 100km before you need another relay (and carry a lot more data).
Where this initiative by Google works is getting the rest of the world onto the internet somehow, and profiting off being the base-level service provider. Which would be quite a thing - a world where everyone could send some packet data at any time, would be very different to today where even leaving my house raises serious questions about how online I maybe over the next 48 hours.
They're thinking long term. If you provide cheap (free?) balloon-based internet access, you will open opportunities for people who have little access to the outside world.
> The long game is being fully wired. By the time poor
> areas become economically important enough to be
> advertised to, they will have traditional telecoms
> servicing them.
... And by that time, they will all be users of the google ecosystem thanks to this.
I'd say it still hasn't branched out. It is very much an "internet" company. So anything related to the internet (and data nowadays) is somehow going to benefit their bottom-line.
I think the phrase "to be on the internet" is going to finally loose its meaning soon. With everything around you (and on you) connected to the global network, you'll be on the Internet all the time. Just as you have your eyes and ears open all the time.
It's fascinating to see how well Google has branched out. It started as just a search engine competing with Lycos, AltaVista, & Yahoo and yet they didn't just stop, they kept going.
This project is not a branching out. This is what happens when it's cheaper to expand your market (create the pie bigger) than trying to cutting into market share (take a bigger bite out of the pie).
it's not branching out as much as broadening their distribution channels. every project meant to increase availability of internet access is increasing google ad traffic, but hey, this one is crazy and amazing!
It's so encouraging to see a Hacker News comment section that is almost overwhelming informative and positive. I get varying amounts of flak for constantly posting about the quality and nature of HN comments, but as an unabashed optimist it means a lot to me to me.
Yeah, I'm looking for a discussion about technology and maybe somebody have an idea how latency would be. But all I see is typical comments you find in any social network.
I really enjoyed the subtle design / aspects of the loon landing page.
Starting with the darker background of the thermosphere and progressing into the twilight of the troposphere was a really nice touch. I also just noticed the small altimeter on the left of the page.
Also the whole phonetic wordplay with "loon" and "lunar" was cute. Coming from New Hampshire, I naturally immediately thought of the aquatic bird:
I immediately thought of "loon" as part of "balloon" and also "loon" as in insane or ridiculous. It's a perfect name for something so ridiculous with the potential to be ridiculously awesome.
However, in my mind, there is a potential issue that the article doesn't seem to mention.
How do they keep the balloons up for a long period of time, fighting all of the different variables of weather, gas leakage, temperature variances, material degradation due to being outdoors?
Fiber and copper stays in the ground undisturbed for decades, because it's cheap & low maintenance, barring from breaks.
While this seems cheap and easy to deploy, keeping it running is another thing entirely
I'm assuming there's some sort of monitoring onboard system and when they need new parts, they'd just land at one of these predetermined stations and be refitted. There weren't a lot of details in that video but it seemed to me like they implied they were inexpensive and easy to swap parts from.
But they're tethered, right? Or no? if they're untethered, that's just crazy awesome. If they're tethered, I'm still slightly worried about the cables.
OH! They're just going to make enough that there is always one overhead! That's so damn cool. I can barely believe it. Wireless technology is some of the most amazing stuff.
Not tethered, as nostromo mentioned. The hazards created by cables in the air for airplanes would kill the idea before it could take off (pun not intended).
It's low power in known bands, but coving a very large area. Maybe somebody could launch their own jamming balloons. In the short term Google says they'll abide local laws so I suspect no jamming will be needed.
If I'm China, I don't care about how expensive the targets are, I just care whether keeping my death-grip on the Internet is worth the price of the ammunition.
I'm not sure what you mean. The previous conversations, and history of stories, offer insite into the technical, cultural, and legal issues that everyone might find valuable. News without context is just hype.
> Loon balloons are superpressure, which enable them to stay aloft for 100+ days at a time. This is far longer than typical weather balloons, which last for a matter of hours. Loon balloons are also unique in that they are steerable and entirely solar powered.
It's like they are putting up cheap, disposable, steerable satellites up in the stratosphere! Genius.
Would be pretty interesting to understand the monitoring and control system for the balloons - not sure if they can bring back the failing balloons to a maintenance site to refurbish and relaunch them or they just dump the debris along with the failed balloon. I suppose at least the electronics aboard must be reusable for a time longer than the 100+ days the balloon stays afloat.
Trying to do an "Energy Budget" with my low-power research background. Please help with the balloon angle.
.1 - 1W Balloon height adjustments
.1 - .5W Flight tracking, control and management
.5 - 2W RF power and conversions (balloon-to-ground)
.5 - 2W RF power and conversions (balloon-to-baloon)
1 - 2W Packet routing, processing and baseband processing
Essential missing insight: how to they lower/rise the balloons and deflate/inflate them? With 100days service time you cannot simply vent gas. So a pump and compressor is needed?
Did it say somewhere that they last 100 days? That number sounds familiar, but I couldn't find it just now when I went back to the site. I wonder how far the balloons would travel during those 100 days. As you can tell from the video, they're going to spend most of their lives drifting over the ocean.
This sounded like a great idea to me at first. But,
Each balloon provides coverage to a 40km diameter area. That's a lot of balloons to cover rural Africa. It would help a great deal if the balloons could be made to stay in precise locations, like geostationary satellites. I thought maybe they had solved that problem (which would be amazing). But, I guess not. They said in the video that the balloons would follow the wind all the way around the Earth. Meaning, at any given time, the overwhelming majority of balloons are over the ocean. The difficulty, then, is not merely putting enough balloons up to cover the ground in 40km increments, but covering the ocean as well, in a solid band around the entire Earth. It's not hard to imagine that a stupendous number of balloons would be required to provide any meaningful level of coverage.
I think this is more Google hubris than technical innovation.
The balloons are not going to move in one direction though. The video also mentioned you can steer the balloons, which means, there is way to keep them above the ground and not the ocean.
If you watch the video, they say that the winds mostly blow west-to-east, opposite the Earth's rotation, and they can't counteract that. They show the balloons traveling across the ocean.
It doesn't help the way the landmasses are oriented in the southern hemisphere. I think it's a given that the majority of balloons will always be over water. They mentioned a demo in, I think, New Zealand with a handful of balloons. It would be interesting to know how long they'll have for the demo before the balloons are pushed out to sea, and whether the coverage area will be constantly drifting.
The video seemed to show the balloons in a thin band encircling the Earth. Aiming to cover a thin band would seem far likelier to be achievable than spreading them over a broad swath. They also mention using the steering ability to form them in clusters, which is probably what you'd need to solidly cover an area.
Just cover the continent will require a lot of balloons. The world has 148,429,000 sq km. If you cover 1600 sq km per balloon, that is 92768 balloons. Just cover Africa will require around 20k balloons. It will only work out, if Google can increase the coverage area per balloon.
20K ballons doesn't seem like that many unless each one costs a ton of money. From an industrial production point of view it barely seems like a drop in the bucket given how many cars/phones/planes we produce.
Each balloon would cover a circle, so it'd be more like 1,250 sq km. I think it would be optimistic to expect each balloon to cover exactly that area. They'd need to overlap just to eliminate gaps, and I'm sure there's a random element to their motion, so that would require them to overlap more.
4 million balloons and routers would cover earth. That's actually not a lot compared to how many cars and cellphones are manufactured every year. If each one is $100 dollars, the total cost is only 400 million - less than google fiber installed in kansas city ($1 billion).
Google is a business. They're only going to spend big money on a project if they expect to make a profit. Even if it might be possible in theory to provide coverage to the whole world via balloons, you'd have to be willing to lose a lot of money. From the standpoint of philanthropy, you would most likely get more benefit per dollar in other ways. For instance, the Gates Foundation has spent a lot in Africa on fighting diseases, and I'm sure lots more money could be spent on that.
> Google is a business. They're only going to spend big money on a project if they expect to make a profit.
People say this as if this was a law of physics. It's not. The company buildings will not spontaneously combust if they try to do something that is not calculated to make optimal short-term profit. They prove, time and again, that they care about awesome/worldchanging more than they care about the money. As someone pointed out in other thread, they even structured their stock options so that grumpy shareholders who care only about short-term profit can't get in the way.
Maybe they figure that each new person on the internet will have a good chance of being a Google costumer. Or maybe they'll charge for access in rich countries, but give it away in poor countries.
I think you're missing something - you don't need to be connected to the internet constantly in order for the internet to be very valuable to you. If you have access once a week for 30 minutes, that's a lot more than never. That's enough to send emails and keep in touch with the outside world in new ways.
If the balloons could be controlled accurately enough to provide internet access at a specific time each week, then you have a point. But if they fly over unpredictably, guided by the wind, then it's not going to be nearly as useful.
The site linked here has a tone of triumphalism, but you can tell from other information about this project that Google is approaching this realistically. I like how Google's engineer said that they're expecting many more iterations of prototypes. No one in Africa is going to be grateful for a system that's a nonworking pile of junk. Whether or not it's worth rolling out will depend on how well it works technically, and that will become clear through testing.
But I feel like that would make the media -- followed by average people -- go crazy. Consider the current NSA news combined with "Google puts hundreds of cameras in the sky".
A handful of police departments in the US already have constantly floating omni-directional camera drone balloons. The technology is only getting cheaper.
Huh ... don't look now, but Google is already putting hundreds of cameras in the sky, daily. Various aircraft, even some satellites, are devoted to Google imagery. Having a new fleet of balloon-based "craft" providing imagery could easily fit into Google's M.O.
Well like if you didn't have a camera in your pocket for years. Or like cameras hidden in pens weren't available cheaply for years. Seriously, the time for people to be scared of others recording things is has already passed (mostly unnoticed).
Look at it this way: if I wanted the government to put a CCTV camera in front of my house and snap photos once a year, it would mean I thought the best way to publish pictures of my house was to take tax dollars, enforce it through legislation, submit it to the whims of politicians, suffer the fruits of their corruption as they sell me out, and on and on.
Me? If I want to publish pictures of my house, I would likely use some sort of internet service to do so... therefore:
The laws around private companies photographing private property are both (1) very restrictive and (2) well known and well tested in court. Compare that to warrantless spying only reviewed by a secret court – and even then the government fails to (1) keep it secret, (2) abide by their own court's rulings, or (3) successfully apply the intel to the stated cause of terrorist threats.
Basically, there aren't really very many things the government does well at all.
When Google wants to send a car down my avenue or fly a balloon over my house, they'll be regulated by laws that literally follow the Streisand effect... in other words, if I don't want you to see my backyard, I might have to put up a roof.
It'll be uncomfortable, yes. And maybe Google isn't the best company to publish live video of an entire continent to the internet. But if someone else doesn't beat them to it, I imagine Google is going there. What's your contingency plan?
I hate this line of thinking. Nobody is watching you. Nobody is monitoring you. Even with PRISM, it's a massive amount of data, and unless you are on some watch list, nobody gives two shits about you specifically.
Oh they could also use them like bombs and drop them on the "bad guys". They just need to make sure they explode with enough intensity, imagine a shit ton of these "cheap" balloons (economy of scale + ad-supported) just falling out of sky, and exploding everywhere lolz
Can someone explain why this is more cost effective than other alternatives? The need for specialized antenna's on the ground seems to be a negative.
Also, does Google just subsidize the entire thing? How is this paid for long term? How is it so much cheaper than the alternatives that not only can they roll it out to 5-6 billion people, but also allow people living on cents a day to purchase the service?
Do you have some back of the envelope calculations of cost of this versus satellite or extending copper wire? I'm fairly ignorant on the subject, but would love to hear more.
This is great question. In urban area it is extremly cheap to buy area for towers. What area can a tower cover with LTE? What is the theoretical limit with different technology?
Unless of course it is a trade secret, how wonderful would be if the engineers at Google would release more detailed diagrams of the balloons, circuits, and how it is supposed to work (the pump, antenna and everything, not the simplistic version). Maybe they are having some challenges which can be crowd sourced for ideas too. They have obviously done a lot of research and this idea can certainly spawn other awesome ideas or help other indie projects.
Project like these can be a really nice experiment on teaching and getting ideas from bored internet hackers.
Seconded. I think it would be just as interesting to see the projects that they've killed. They've said before that one of the goals of Google[x] is to fail fast. I imagine they've already accumulated quite the graveyard of crazy proposals.
I wonder what implications this is going to hvae for NBN in Australia. They are spending tons of money to launch two satellites to provide access to remote towns. Google is showing they can do it for cheaper, possibly, and with Fiber they are showing gigabit FTH can be done cheaply...
While the geek in me acknowledges this is an awesome project and I'm really glad to see them giving it a try, the sarcastic cynic in me had the first thought that this was a great way to bring the the remaining 2/3 of the world under NSA surveillance.
Unfortunately, if more people start using the Internet the NSA database will inevitably grow. I wonder how long it'll take the whole human population is covered by the NSA.
Has not be debunked in any way. As far as I understand it's far from clear what the NSA can actually do. Declaration of officials who are under oath to protect secrets is worth nothing.
In some regards, so am I, though this comment made me think that in some regards, Loon is a necessary component of Glass's success. There are huge areas of even just the U.S. which don't have cell/wireless internet coverage and Glass would be fairly useless, or significantly less useful, there currently.
Yes, but do you really think those rural areas are going to want to walk around lie cyber dorks? The corp I work for has already banned glass on premises.
Whether people in rural areas will or not, someone not from a rural area who does use Glass may want to travel outside of cell coverage areas and keep using it. Furthermore, far in the future it's fair to presume such devices would be miniaturized and likely become more acceptable.
My back-of-the-envelope first-approximation math suggests you'd need "only" about half a million of these things to cover the entire surface area of the Earth. To me, that seemed a surprisingly low number.
If my neighbour and I are 30km apart, and covered by the same balloon, does our traffic get turned around on the balloon, rather than hoping to the base station and then back again? I have to assume yes.
If we are 30km apart and we are actually connected to two neighbouring balloons, will they route traffic between them, and again, not via the base station? Again, have to assume yes.
So do I get a single IP address, or do I keep changing when the balloons are overhead? I assume I get a single IP address, but my home router is actually going to have to do some intelligent next hop routing.
Mesh networking is a challenging area when the base stations are fixed, with weather effects and moving end users an issue. Even more challenging when your "base stations" are moving, weather effects are significantly greater, and you're super limited to the amount of onboard processing you can do.
Remember late last year, when there were rumors about Google being in talks to acquire Dish network?
I couldn't imagine that Google would actually use Dish's spectrum to build a traditional cellular network. Building all those towers is a huge investment and I didn't think that played to Google's strengths. But, assuming that Loon needs licensed spectrum, maybe Loon (or something like it) was the plan?
Well then, wireless internet escalated quickly. In all seriousness tho', this was unexpected. They said that it will be working with an antenna of sorts that you attach to your house? Fast forward 10 years and it will be an integrated wifi replacement in every machine - giving internet to you even in places where there's no electricity. That's the future I'd give my liver to see.
I'm not sure they've thought through the effects of creating that many more consumers and producers to compete with - especially when service industries, services that can be delivered at range, are becoming so dominant. This seems like the sort of thing that's going to force down the price of labour again.
I don't see the percentage for developed countries - seems maladaptive.
I find stuff like this awe-inspiring, particularly w/r/t how it could be used to protect internet access for not only those who are underprivileged but also for those being denied internet access by autocratic governments. Think back to Egypt, Libya, Syria - how different could those have gone if the authorities had been unable to shut down communication networks?
I wonder if Google are working with the Serval guys in Australia on this. They are turning Android devices into wireless meshes and have been sending up balloons with device + high gain aerials for quite a while... With the same project motives in mind: disaster recovery (with ground and pole based setup, including voice calls and txt messages with higher QoS over the network), and extending coverage to less populated parts of the world. Australia is a huge place. Wireless is the only sane option for large large parts of the country, and towers, with power - you have to get it there somehow , are expensive. Yes solar is often an option (though it makes the base station in the middle of nowhere a very attractive target for thieves) and I'll be very interested to see how Google will solve that one (assume balloons will be semi covered in panels plus quite large batteries, and possibly small amounts of wind generation?).
I'm curious as to the commercial viability of this. Will Google offer access for free or will you require a subscription? As a throwaway account mentioned, Space Data Corp. already offers this kind of service, but to large industrial companies, that can afford to pay a lot more than people in currently disconnected regions.
What kind of technology are they using to send the signal from the balloons to the ground? Though there were succesfull attempts to establish succesful WIFI links from the ground to stratoshpere(even 25 miles as I recall) this was achieved using precise DIRECT antennas (impossible when balloons are in constant movement)
Awesome. There are probably alot of things you can do with metrics on usage, availability, even mapping/weather and some fun camera views and more beyond just a line in the ground. So many more informational uses with it being airborne.
I love how google has so much money they can spend money on pet projects like these. No wonder they attract people with so many "impossible ideas" that sometimes turn out to be pet projects worth spending come money on.
Awesome idea!!! This will eventually provide alternative to the current telecom carriers....
In the long run they could provide the service free for Google Wallet users... They'll make profit on Wallet transaction...
Next up, Loon servers? I can't wait having my torrents served from the stratosphere. I believe TPB was already considering having drone-based servers - balloons just seem so much cheaper.
So the balloons just float on the air channels 20km up and presumably circulate around world? I can imagine problems coming up with some countries objecting to these being over their airspace.
This master's thesis from 2005 ("The Vertical Limit of State Sovereignty") has a fairly comprehensive account of the history and present state of international law in this area:
After the communications platform goes up, then the other payloads can hitch a ride.
Imaging getting real time video from the stratosphere to everywhere all the time. The weather data alone would be awesome. The traffic data would be great. The IR imagery catching forest fires or amazon jungle burning would be great. An almost real time collection for finding illegal logging or toxic waste dumping.
When there are clouds of these ballons going overhead, who will notice an extra one or two that happen to have militarized payloads.
On first reading this, I had to check the date to make sure it wasn't April Fools because I thought it sounded a little silly... The more I read it though, the cooler it sounds...
There are quite a few technical challenges here (weight of cables, stability at 20 mi, erosion by much intense radiation etc). Details on one of the previous efforts which was considered revolutionary but never became main stream can be seen here: http://www.spacedata.net/news040108.htm.
In the first video, yeah having a freakin kid tell you why the world needs to be connected and explaining concepts that he/she is having problem even pronouncing does make me wanna support this lunatic loon project so google can whore out the rest of the planet with their ads. Can't stop imagining how useful this will be to the #nsa
Wasn't Page about to focus? Shutting down small, useful and used tools because Google should only do a few thngs, but all of them well?
So will this litter the countryside, and even worse, the oceans with electronic equipment incl. highly toxic batteries? will they maintain and retrieve every single one of those balloons? who pays for that?
They address this in one of the videos. They can direct the balloons to land at collection points for recycling etc. How they do that I have no idea - but it's definitely something they've considered in great detail.
Q: WHAT STEPS IS PROJECT LOON TAKING TO BE ENVIRONMENTALLY RESPONSIBLE?
A: We are taking several steps to ensure Project Loon does not negatively impact the environment:
- We’re working to guide all balloons to collection points upon descent, so we can reuse, recycle, or dispose of the parts responsibly
- When balloons do not make it to one of these collection points, we will be offering a reward for reporting the location of the balloon so we can collect it
- We can track where the balloons land and we have a team of people who focus on recovering the balloons
- We'll have a boat for recovering balloons that go into the sea close to New Zealand
- We've started looking into using biodegradable films for our balloon envelopes
- Our balloons’ electronics are entirely solar powered.
"Our balloons’ electronics are entirely solar powered." I wonder if that means there won't be batteries. But no batteries would mean no service at night. Also, no navigation at night.
Pulling them out of the deep ocean would likely be infeasible. They might be able to make them float, though, and get them when they wash up on a beach somewhere.
It gave people free bandwidth in exchange for being a part of a global survelliance system. I hope Project Loon doesn't have such a dubious second nature.
Sounds cool, but there is one issue: latency. I remember using the Internet in the mid-1980s, specifically using servers in Norway and other locations from my office in San Diego. Because of a few satellite hops, the latency was about 2 seconds. It made remote use of Emacs interesting :-)
Amazing idea, but then the rest of the world (non-americans) are still worried about the implications of this for PRISM. Getting the rest of the world online is cool, but then the NSA gets to have access to their data,that's not cool and I was beginning to like Google!
Yes, everyone in Africa is waiting for internet to use with their smart phones.
Evading the censorship is a better idea but I am pretty sure China wouldn't allow such a thing to fly over their country. Or at least make it suffer with network attacks or DDOS or something.
Is really that impractical to use stationary WiMax access points instead?
Last time I checked range was around 30 miles, couple of stations will blanket a good area without the hassle these balloons bring (you need to pick them and relaunch every couple of weeks, etc...).
Some benefits over stationary towers is that you can easily move the balloons based on different things like natural disasters, political unrest or even to just improve bandwidth under heavy load.
Each balloon can provide connectivity to a ground area about 40 km in
diameter at speeds comparable to 3G. For balloon-to-balloon and
balloon-to-ground communications, the balloons use antennas
equipped withspecialized radio frequency technology. Project
Loon currently uses ISM bands (specifically 2.4 and 5.8 GHz bands)
that are available for anyone to use.
With all the PRISM & NSA news coming out, I can't discard that this might be yet another tool to go after remote 'Jihadists' and people of interest. Whether Google is doing it wittingly or not is yet to be determined.
I wouldn't vouch for it until the complete tech stack is open-source, and the devices are manufactured and deployed by someone else than Google. I expect them to be shot down eventually if that doesn't happen.
Well, Google owned global balloon network is just too scary. I guess it doesn't have to be open-source if there's means to reverse engineer these things, and be sure that there's no way for Google to gather information or intercept the traffic.
Perhaps I'm pessimistic but my immediate thought is how much Google is involved, i.e are they providing the backbones the balloons connect to? The last thing I'd want is Google knowing every URL I visit.
How long before they abandon the idea? Google is well known for creating projects for shits and giggles and abandoning them when it turns out giggles don't make money.
In light of the whole surveillance issue, how to approach the matter of foreign balloons drifting in and out of the airspace of many different countries? Can they steer around countries that want no part of it?
It doesn't take too much imagination to envision balloons doing things like taking high-res photos and videos, collecting all manner of signals from communications equipment, radars and other military equipment, or even carrying onboard weapons. Basically the same things drones do.
How can they assure skeptical people and governments that these balloons aren't carrying something extra in addition to their statued misson?
I wonder if they have any plans to move away from helium as a buoyancy gas.. I can't help but feel we need to save every atom of that stuff for MRI machines
A worthy project, to be sure, but the networking guy in me hears "space" and immediately starts worrying about the latency. Does anyone know if there's technical data available on the standard network metrics of this solution (latency, packet loss, jitter...)?
