In early 2021, Alphabet shut down Loon. It’s a familiar story in the history of Google X: an ambitious moonshot with huge upside that died before it could gain any meaningful traction nearly a decade later.
“Despite Loon’s extraordinary technical progress,” X explains, somewhat melancholy, on the previous project’s page, “the road to commercial viability has proven to be much longer and riskier than anticipated, so , Loon’s journey comes to an end in 2021.”
The project uses weather balloons to deliver high-speed internet to areas lacking infrastructure, such as sub-Saharan Africa. Loon has generated a lot of interest and has been used following natural disasters such as the hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico in 2017.
Some of Loon’s underlying technology has been carried over into other Alphabet projects. At the same time, Airbus continues its legacy through AALTO. However, Loon relied on balloons, while the new project utilizes Zephyr solar-powered drones.
“[Loon] Customer engagement is very high,” AALTO CEO Samer Halawi told TechCrunch at Mobile World Congress last week. “They got people signing up for the service very quickly. But what happens is the balloon moves around. To overcome this problem, they used multiple balloons and passed the signal from one balloon to another. They ended up having to use eight times as many balloons to cover the same area. “
AALTO relies on fixed-wing drones whose movements are at least more predictable than weather balloons. Airbus acquired fixed-wing drone technology in 2022 from QinetiQ, a company owned by the UK Department of Defense and Space.
The Zephyr takes off from a circular runway and ascends in an ever-expanding spiral. The drone reached an altitude of more than 60,000 feet in the stratosphere. This makes them higher than commercial aircraft as well as weather phenomena that can hinder solar coverage. It turns out that this airspace is also nearly as regulated as the airspace below it.
According to AALTO, each drone can cover up to 7,500 square kilometers of ground, equivalent to up to 250 cell phone towers. Once airborne, the system can run for months on solar power alone. Every six months or so, the system undergoes battery replacement because the battery still has a limited shelf life.
AALTO’s market development includes transactions with carriers and government agencies. Like Loon before it, the company is also exploring temporary deployment of downed cell phone towers after natural disasters.
