Nowadays, everything around us seems to be connected. Information can readily be shared through the Internet. Keeping in touch with friends and loved ones on the other side of the world has never been so easy. The terrible and horrific hurricanes Irma and Maria, however, left many thousands of people homeless, without food or water and unreachable in Puerto Rico. The storms disabled almost all of the cell towers leaving the inhabitants not only cut off from the outside world but also from each other. Many people went through a terrible time of not knowing whether their loved ones or family members were still alive and where they were. (Roof 2017)
Project Loon, led by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, designed a new technology with which they can help make Puerto Rico reachable again (Hruska 2017). They have designed floating cell towers. These floating cell towers are large polyethylene balloons and can be compared to the size of a tennis-court (Hale 2017). The balloons are floated up into the Earth’s stratosphere where they will float around 20 kilometers into the sky. They are floated into the stratosphere by using helium. From here, the polyethylene balloons can beam down cellular service onto Puerto Rico with a reach of 5,000 square kilometers on land. High speed Internet is transmitted up to balloons from telecommunication partners on the ground, the Internet is relayed across the network of the balloons and then transmitted down to the users on the ground. The balloons can transmit Internet with a connection speed of up to 10mbps directly to the LTE phones of the people. The balloons provide the connectivity in the areas where it is much needed regardless of the conditions on land.
Project Loon will provide the Puerto Ricans with much-needed access to cellular service so that they can connect with loved ones and get access to life-saving information. Worth mentioning is that half of the world’s population still does not have access to Internet. Project Loon aims to launch and maintain a fleet of the polyethylene balloons to provide access to people in rural and remote areas across the globe (X.company 2017).
To learn more about their technology click on this link for an interactive overview: https://x.company/loon/technology/
Hale, T. (2017). Internet-Beaming Balloons Will Deliver Communications to Puerto Rico. [online] IFLScience. Available at: http://www.iflscience.com/technology/google-s-internet-beaming-balloons-will-deliver-communications-to-puetro-rico/ [Accessed 10 Oct. 2017].
Hruska, J. (2017). Project Loon Gets Green Light to Deploy Over Puerto Rico – ExtremeTech. [online] ExtremeTech. Available at: https://www.extremetech.com/internet/257200-google-project-loon-gets-fcc-green-light-deploy-puerto-rico [Accessed 11 Oct. 2017].
Roof, K. (2017). Google parent Alphabet looks to restore cell service in Puerto Rico with Project Loon balloons. [online] TechCrunch. Available at: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/07/google-parent-alphabet-looks-to-restore-cell-service-in-puerto-rico-with-project-loon-balloons/ [Accessed 9 Oct. 2017].
X.company. (2017). Project Loon. [online] Available at: https://x.company/loon/ [Accessed 11 Oct. 2017].
