Google's Project Loon Will Provide Internet To The Entire World

It’s all too easy to forget that over two thirds of the world’s population has no internet access. This project is designed to allow all these people in remote areas to get online, in what would otherwise be an internet black hole.

The basic concept is to launch a bunch of balloons, letting to float to roughly 20km above the Earth’s service. Here in the stratosphere, this army of balloons will carry a network signal which can be connected to from the service, with the balloons transmitting the data between them. The more balloons launched, the larger the communications network.

The balloons themselves last roughly 100 days in the stratosphere before floating gently back down to Earth. Once they land they’ll be picked up by ‘Loonists’, filled with more Helium gas, and launched back into the heavens. So far Project Loon has already been successfully tested in New Zealand, California, and Brazil, where it has provide internet access for extremely remote areas.

The whole process seems slightly ridiculous, but it’s easy to see why Google’s interested in this. Despite its giant status, Google can currently only feasibly serve a third of the planet’s population, with Project Loon its market opens exponentially.

What do you think of Google’s quest to provide internet to the world? Do you think a company so large should be the gatekeeper to potentially billions of people’s network connections?