Industry
Alphabet Inc. closes Loon after deciding that the industry, which offers balloons as an alternative to cell towers, is not commercially viable, parent company Google said Thursday.
PHOTO FILE: The Google Loon Project Internet Balloon will be featured at the 2016 Google I / O developer conference in Mountain View, California May 19, 2016. REUTERS / Stephen Lam / File Photo
OAKLAND, Calif.: Alphabet Inc. closes Loon after deciding that the industry, which offers balloons as an alternative to cell towers, is not commercially viable, parent company Google said Thursday.
Founded in 2011, Loon aimed to bring connections to areas of the world where the construction of cell towers is too expensive or cumbersome using balloons along tennis courts and solar-powered network gear.
But the wireless carriers that Loon saw as customers questioned the technical and political viability of the idea.
“While we found a number of willing partners along the way, we found no way to get the costs low enough to build a sustainable, long-term business,” Loon CEO Alastair Westgarth said in a blog post.
Rich DeVaul, founder of the project that is no longer with Alphabet, said that a huge demand for mobile connectivity making towers cost-effective in more of the world than it was estimated a decade ago, is declining the need for Loon.
“The problem was solved faster than we thought,” he said in an interview.
Westgarth said Loon’s legacy would include the development of helium balloons lasting hundreds of days in space and communications equipment that will provide cell coverage over an area 200 times larger than those reached by an average cell tower. .
However, a carrier would need several balloons at once, each costing tens of thousands of dollars and lasting only about five months.
Loon launched a pilot project in Kenya in 2020, years on schedule following a regulatory delay.
His partner, Telkom Kenya, said their joint service with Loon will run until March 1st.
“Over the coming months, the Loon team will work closely with Telkom to ensure that the technology pilot service activity is folded safely and smoothly,” Telkom said in a statement.
The technology was previously successful in short projects to provide cell coverage in Peru and Puerto Rico when cell towers collapsed with natural disasters.
Loon was seeking contracts with countries and international organizations for future emergencies, but with little success.
Loon said it may share its technology with carriers, governments or non-profit organizations that aim to bring high-speed internet to the last few places in the world.
The company hired 200 people as of 2019. It attracted an investment of US $ 125 million that year from SoftBank’s HAPSMobile, which operates on floating cell equipment using drones.
HAPSMobile declined to comment on the financial impact of the Loon closure but said it would continue to “work towards our goal of developing a commercial business”.
Separately, companies backed by billions of entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, continue to look at offering Internet connections using satellites in orbit near Earth.
Alphabet already has some of what it calls its “other bets”, or groups that are separate from Google, including one working on a power-generating buzzard.
His Wing business aims to trade goods delivered by drone.
(Additional report by Duncan Miriri in Nairobi; edition by Peter Cooney, Gerry Doyle and Jason Neely)