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At the beginning of 2021, Alphabet shut down its Loon service. It was a familiar story in the annals of Google
“Despite Lon’s extraordinary technical progress,” X explains with a tinge of gloom Previous project page“The road to commercial viability proved to be much longer and riskier than hoped, so in 2021 Loon’s journey came to an end.”
The project used weather balloons to deliver high-speed internet to infrastructure-poor regions such as sub-Saharan Africa. The color has generated a great deal of interest and has seen its use following natural disasters such as the hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico in 2017.
Some of Loon’s core technology is in another Alphabet project. At the same time, Airbus maintains its spirit by… Aalto. While Loon relied on balloons, the latest project uses solar-powered Zephyr drones.
“[Loon] “It’s gotten good engagement with customers,” Samer Halawi, CEO of AALTO, told TechCrunch in an interview last week at Mobile World Congress. “They got people to sign up for the service very quickly. But what happened was that the balloons were moving. What they did to get around that was they used multiple balloons and they transferred a signal from one to another. They ended up having to use the balloons eight times to cover the same area.”
AALTO relies on fixed-wing drones, which are – at the very least – more predictable than weather balloons. Airbus will acquire fixed-wing drone technology from the UK Ministry of Defense and aerospace company QinetiQ in 2022.
Zephyrs take off from a circular runway, ascending in an ever-widening spiral. Drones reach the stratosphere at an altitude of more than 60,000 feet. This keeps it above commercial aircraft, as well as weather phenomena that can hinder solar coverage. As it turns out, the airspace is also not regulated to nearly the same degree as that below it.
According to AALTO figures, each drone can account for up to 7,500 square kilometers of the Earth’s surface, or the equivalent of up to 250 cell towers. Once in the atmosphere, the system can operate for months on solar energy alone. Every six months or so, the system will come down to replacing the battery, as it still has a limited lifespan.
AALTO’s entry into the market includes deals with carriers, as well as government agencies. Like Loon before it, the company is also exploring temporary deployment of downed cell towers in the wake of natural disasters.
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