Google Shuts Down Project Loon, Its Internet-Powered Balloons

22/01/2021

Alphabet is Google's parent company. Having a multitude of products and revenue accounting to billions of dollars, the company has much to spent in terms of research and development.

One of which, is spending money on moonshot projects.

And among the many moonshot projects Google was developing, was Project Loon.

Project Loon is Google's moonshot idea for beaming internet connectivity from the stratosphere using giant high-altitude Helium-powered balloons. The balloons can provide an aerial wireless network to remote areas with up to 1 Mbit/s speeds.

Project Loon began as a research and development project by X (formerly Google X) in 2011, before it was later spun out into a separate company in July 2018.

But despite having raised $125 million from investment, Alphabet was forced to terminate Project Loon after failing to find a sustainable business model and partners for one of its most prominent moonshot projects.

Goodbye Google Project Loon
A photo showing one Loon balloon taking off.

According to Alastair Westgarth, chief executive of Loon, in a Medium blog post.

"We talk a lot about connecting the next billion users, but the reality is Loon has been chasing the hardest problem of all in connectivity — the last billion users,”

“The communities in areas too difficult or remote to reach, or the areas where delivering service with existing technologies is just too expensive for everyday people. While we’ve found a number of willing partners along the way, we haven’t found a way to get the costs low enough to build a long-term, sustainable business. Developing radical new technology is inherently risky, but that doesn’t make breaking this news any easier.”

In other words, Loon that "is focused on bringing connectivity to unserved and underserved communities around the world," is considered by Alphabet as a money-eater.

“Sadly, despite the team’s groundbreaking technical achievements over the last 9 years […] the road to commercial viability has proven much longer and riskier than hoped,” said Astro Teller, who leads Alphabet’s experimental X lab.

“So we’ve made the difficult decision to close down Loon.”

And also, the growing interest of SpaceX and Amazon in this space have also influenced Alphabet’s decision.

Goodbye Google Project Loon
The Project Loon team in Mountain View, California, U.S..

But still, Loon was considered a success.

“The Loon team is proud to have catalyzed an ecosystem of organizations working on providing connectivity from the stratosphere. The world needs a layered approach to connectivity — terrestrial, stratospheric, and space-based — because each layer is suited to different parts of the problem. In this area, Loon has made a number of important technical contributions,” wrote Westgarth.

Loon has brought connectivity to several remote places around the world, and that should have indeed benefited Google as a brand.

But being a money-eater, Alphabet is not seeing much benefit in maintaining Loon in a long term.

With Alphabet terminating Loon, the giant tech company plans to take some of Loon’s technology forward and share what it learned from this project to others. What's more, “some of Loon’s technology — like the high bandwidth (20Gbps+) optical communication links that were first used to beam a connection between balloons bopping in the stratosphere — already lives on in Project Taara."

Project Taara is similar Project Loon, but instead of using balloons, it uses invisible beams of lights to deliver internet connectivity. Just like fiber optics but without the presence of a physical cable.

Alphabet in terminating Loon came just a month after Loon balloons were made smarter with Google AI.