How Do Google's Balloons Provide Internet Access to Ravaged Puerto Rico?
Puerto Rico was rendered powerless and cut off from communication with the rest of the world following Hurricane Maria's onslaught in late September. More than a month later, the island's cell phone towers are still out of service, and Google has sent over a fleet of balloons to fill the gap.
It was Google who first announced Project Loon, a technological initiative to provide Internet to remote or inaccessible parts of the world using special balloons, back in 2013. The project has since been spun off to X, a company started by Google's umbrella firm, Alphabet.
Earlier this month, the FCC has given the project the green light for their attempt to restart communications in Puerto Rico after about 95 percent of its cellular towers were knocked out of commission by Hurricane Maria's Category 4 winds.
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The X company has since made some progress reinstating Internet access on the island, as they detailed via a blog update on Friday, Oct. 20.
"Working with AT&T, Project Loon is now supporting basic communication and internet activities like sending text messages and accessing information online for some people with LTE enabled phones," Alastair Westgarth, Head of Project Loon, wrote in the news update.
Each balloon, flying as high as 20 kilometers up in the air, acts like a floating cell phone tower that links areas to an existing cellular network. As the company demonstrated in earlier tests in Peru, they can already keep a fleet of these solar-powered balloons afloat for three months at a time, according to Ars Technica.
To keep the balloons from being blown off their assigned areas, the X company equipped them with pumps that move them up or down. This lets the fleet take advantage of the relatively constant wind patterns at the higher altitudes to fly them in a loop over the region.
"Project Loon is still an experimental technology and we're not quite sure how well it will work, but we hope it helps get people the information and communication they need to get through this unimaginably difficult time," Westgarth added.
