Google parent Alphabet has announced that it is bringing its Project Loon Internet balloons to Indonesia in 2016.
The project will have Alphabet teaming up with the country's three biggest telecommunications providers — Indosat, Telkomsel and XL Axiata — to beam Internet signals from hundreds of the teardrop solar-powered balloons floating around 12 miles up in the sky down to even the most remote places in Indonesia's thousands of islands, according to Mike Cassidy, vice president of Project Loon.
"Over the next few years, we're hoping Loon can partner with local providers to put high-speed LTE Internet connections within reach of more than 100 million currently unconnected people — that's enough speed to read websites, watch videos or make purchases," he says.
Google first unveiled Project Loon as part of its secretive moonshots lab Google X, now renamed X under Alphabet, back in 2013. Since then, Google's balloon-powered Internet has been launched in testing in a few other places – New Zealand, Brazil, Australia and Central Valley in California. At the time, speeds were no faster than 3G data, but improvements of the technology allow 4G LTE speeds of up to 10 Mbps, just a little less than the average Internet speed in the U.S.
The decision to choose Indonesia as its next testing ground for Project Loon was not difficult to make. As Cassidy points out, Indonesia is the perfect place to see if the project has matured enough to progress to the next phase, where Alphabet hopes to develop a continuous string of 300 balloons to go around the world somewhere in the Southern hemisphere.
In a country where only one out of three people have access to the Internet, it helps to have a fleet of giant balloons acting like flying cell phone towers and sending Internet signals down to Earth. Moreover, having these balloons floating up in the stratosphere is far more practical than stringing a network of physical cables across Indonesia's thousands of islands.
"Loon can help telecommunications companies extend their networks; high in the sky, we can help overcome the difficulties of spreading equipment across an archipelago of 17,000 islands of jungles and mountains, providing connectivity to even the most remote islands," Cassidy says.
Alphabet is not the only company that plans to deliver Internet to the different corners of the world through the sky. Facebook is also working on a similar initiative, but it uses unmanned, solar-powered planes instead of balloons. While connecting the four billion people in the world who are not online is certainly a commendable goal, it is also not entirely altruistic, since bringing more people to the Internet means better business for both Alphabet and Facebook.
