A ring of balloons circling the Earth could
begin delivering Internet service to
mobile phone users in the Southern
Hemisphere sometime in 2015. That's the
vision of Google's Project Loon, an effort
to get billions of people living off the grid
in remote regions to join the rest of the
world online.
The latest news about Project Loon comes
from Astro Teller, head of the Google X
lab, during a talk at MIT Technology
Review’s EmTech conference in
Cambridge, Mass. “In the next year or so
we should have a semi-permanent ring of
balloons somewhere in the Southern
Hemisphere,” he told the
audience. Google hopes its solar-powered
balloons can use the LTE protocol of cell
phones to provide wireless Internet at a
rate of 5 megabits per second to mobile
users—or as much as 22 Mbps to fixed
antennas, according to Technology Review.
The Internet giant has already begun
holding trials in New Zealand and Brazil,
Teller said.
But Google has more than one trick up its
sleeve in its mission to spread Internet
services worldwide. The Internet giant
has either direct ownership or at least a
strong stake in most of the five
technological options previously
highlighted by IEEE Spectrum as being
capable of delivering wireless Internet
services to the most remote corners of the
Earth.
For instance, Google plans to invest
billions in swarms of satellites capable of
providing Internet services to regions in
both hemispheres. Google also bought the
startup Titan Aerospace, which plans to
deploy high-flying, solar-powered drones
capable of acting as "atmospheric
satellites." Such flying platforms could
complement the satellites and balloons in
blanketing the globe with Internet service.
All these efforts could enable Google to
reach the next several billion Internet
customers who don't yet have access to
reliable Internet service on their cell
phones or other devices. But Google is not
alone in the race to extend Internet to
more people: Facebook also wants to
extend its reach to those billions of
untapped customers. The company
previously flirted with the idea of buying
Titan Aerospace, but has since launched
its own in-house drone effort called the
Connectivity Lab.
The Connectivity Lab aims to begin
testing its own version of high-flying,
solar-powered drones next year, Wired
reports. Eventually, Facebook wants to
deploy its drones to 21 locations in Africa,
Asia, and Latin America sometime
between the next two to five years. That
means the five billion people still living
offline might soon get to choose between
two of the world's largest technology
giants as their Internet providers.

k.

After giving us phones that track all our life activities and location, they now want to make sure all those phones are connected so that they can upload the information.
Hope it is not what I'm thinking