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Comment by mtdewcmu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

I'll be the first to give them credit when they follow through on something.

On another site, which was also on HN (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/introducing-project-l...), they are more forthcoming about the scale of the challenge and the likelihood of success. I like the tone of that page much more than this one.

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.

Utility is not binary. If they provide intermittent access to people who've never had it before, that's a huge deal.

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.

Someone went to an event and posted what he learned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5887330

It's good to see the hard information, because this site is all marketing.

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