Google to beam wifi to Indonesia’s rural areas with balloons

techinasia.com

38 points·williswee··9 comments

With all the nonsense yesterday about the military's lost ballon and what a boondoggle the whole program was, I was thinking they should be repurposed to provide internet.

Do you have the context of that thing?

http://www.airforcetimes.com/story/military/2015/10/28/f-16s...

Long story short: an aerostat broke loose of its mooring in Aberdeen Proving Ground and floated into Pennsylvania. It caused a bit of damage (trailing mooring cable fouled power lines and knocked out electricity to tens of thousands of customers), but went down in a field.

I wonder: How much Helium does each balloon takes and how long does each last once it's filled up?

They last about a month IIRC, and they're not particularly big - the equivalent of 15 or 20 party balloons, I would estimate.

They're supposed to last ~100 days and are pretty large. The time was one of the big points they had to address to get the economics right. The balloons had to last much longer than a normal balloon would.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-1EOC6WWfgA8/UbvU_yFNsKI/A...

I thought Project Loon switched from wifi to LTE last year.

This has probably been in the works for more than a year so they might not have had LTE coverage on the table. Also wifi is arguably more useful than LTE signals to people on the ground since more devices will be able to receive and use it beyond just cell phones and a small number of LTE equipped laptops.

It could have also been a requirement to get the telecoms to work with the project and get it approved.

is there a map of planned coverage? i find it incredibly difficult to find reliable coverage map for any Indonesian internet provider

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