In early 2021, Alphabet shut down Loon. It was a familiar story in the annals of Google
“Despite Loon's extraordinary technical progress,” explains X with a hint of melancholy in his previous project page“The road to commercial viability proved much longer and riskier than expected, so in 2021 Loon's journey came to an end.”
The project used weather balloons to deliver high-speed Internet in places that lack infrastructure, such as sub-Saharan Africa. Loon generated a lot of interest and was used in the wake of natural disasters such as the hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico in 2017.
Some of Loon's core technologies live on in other Alphabet projects. Meanwhile, Airbus maintains its spirit through HIGH. However, while Loon relied on balloons, the newest project uses solar-powered Zephyr drones.
“(Loon) got very good customer engagement,” AALTO CEO Samer Halawi told TechCrunch in an interview last week at Mobile World Congress. “They got people signed up for the service very quickly. However, what happened was that the balloons moved. What they did to overcome this was they used several balloons and they transmitted a signal from one to another. “They ended up having to use the balloons eight times to cover the same area.”
AALTO is based on fixed-wing drones, which are, at the very least, more predictable in their movements than weather balloons. Airbus acquired the technology for fixed-wing drones from QinetiQ, a subsidiary of the UK Department of Defense and Space, in 2022.
The Zephyrs take off from a circular runway and ascend in an ever-widening spiral. Drones reach the stratosphere at an altitude of more than 60,000 feet. This keeps them above commercial airplanes, as well as weather events that can impede solar coverage. It turns out that the airspace is also not regulated to nearly the same degree as those below it.
According to AALTO figures, each drone can occupy up to 7,500 square kilometers of Earth's surface, or the equivalent of up to 250 mobile phone towers. Once in the air, the system can run for months on solar energy alone. Approximately every six months the system will land for a battery change as they still have a limited lifespan.
AALTO's go-to-market includes agreements with operators as well as government agencies. Like Loon before it, the company is also exploring the temporary deployment of downed cell towers following natural disasters.