Gadgetory

inside the massive hangars at Moffett federal airfield Google is attempting to do something that balloon experts deemed impossible deliver high-speed Internet access to the most remote corners of the globe the first 60 or so balloons we launched all burst when they got to altitude which was very sort of disheartening this is something that has never been asked of balloons before to be reliable and to do what we expect them to do before it was just sort of like a vehicle to gain knowledge now we're trying to make a business launched in 2012 the first two years of Project loon were a process of rapid iteration the team had to prove it was possible to deliver reliable Internet access to specific locations in the most remote parts of the globe they began with the simplest possible approach Electronics stuffed into a Styrofoam beer cooler floating at the edge of outer space when that didn't fail they kept moving forward wait Google X works as we try to prove it can't work so the first thing we did was took a router food on a weather balloon up to 10 kilometers and see if you could still get a signal and that part worked and since then it's been a continuous process of trying to stretch the envelope a little bit more every time to see how far it would go last year the team made a critical decision switching from a wireless router to an LTE antenna we are just like a cell phone tower but in the sky and the same way that their central office of the telco interacts with all their self towers they will interact with our balloon another way to think about it is if you drive down the highway on a phone call you will switch between cell towers what we're doing is kind of flipping that on its head so you're standing still in the ground with your LTE phone and as one balloon goes overhead another balloon comes in range and you're switching between one balloon to another without dropping the call the balloons today can cover five thousand square kilometres on the ground you can get 15 megabits per second to your phone or if you have a little MiFi device you can get 40 megabits per second from the balloon but have you guys considered just selling this is like a toy for children's parties and stuff yeah some hash tell me where it is we're seeing here what are you seeing here is a test of our next generation balloon we are doing a ground based inflation trying to mimic what is happening in space I remember when we were building balloons it would take us a week to build them and they would go up and pop and come back down when you first launched it was a pretty nerve-wracking our balloons were lasting anywhere from a day to day and a half maybe two days if you had like a five-day balloon it was like Eureka but as we went along one of the first objectives was what is a goal or target is 100 days ideally for us to have a very commercial business here I have a fashion design degree it's a lot of working with textiles flat patterns working into three-dimensional space we do a lot of different tests with balloons built in different ways they might be a different shape they might have an extra feature we might change the dimension of a feature and try and figure out what works and what doesn't rather than wind and starting all over from start we were looking for industries where we can actually leverage information from one of the areas we looked at was food packaging industries agricultural industries even down to the condom industry and so where these are the places where we need to actually figure out even the tiniest pinholes that matter can actually limit the lifespan of the balloon by like 15-20 days our longest lasting balloon is was up for 173 days until we brought it down now we've gotten the point where most of the balloons will last over a hundred days go and we're awake ha don't put your fingers in there yeah what you're seeing is a balloon inside a balloon we have an unique way of actually adjusting the altitude in these balloons this balloon has a constant volume and there is helium in it right so the helium brings the balloon up and now if we want to change altitude we have another balloon inside the balloon that we fill with air and as we add more air in there the mass is going to increase and the balloon is going to go down okay this is called Haun's and we named it that because there was a Saturday Night Live skit which was Hans and Franz is going to pump you up and what it does is it's a little fan and it pumps air into the balloon it's easy to steer the balloon by picking up different winds in different wind directions at different altitudes by doing small change with altitude you can do something like this you go up use this wind then go down use this wind and go up down up and down so this balloon has straps holding the apex up and that balloon did not right which is why it's sitting down there yeah because yesterday when we were filling it up I got in a twist to the point where it just did that that's what happened there you go so the but we just popped the Ballon a because it was twisted that was the test here over the last six months Google has run tests with Vodafone Telstra and telefónica utilizing their networks to provide connectivity to customers who normally live with little or no internet access loon believes that it can provide service to these remote regions at a fraction of the typical cost communication satellites are typically pretty expensive hundreds of millions of dollars to build and 100 million plus to launch whereas the balloons are an order of magnitude or two cheaper to operate on a sort of daily basis it's too expensive to build wires and cell towers and fiber optics out to all these remote rural regions but the balloons are very cost-effective so the this gives the telco a way to reach everyone in their country with a cost-effective way right now loon mostly operates in the southern hemisphere where it's had better luck securing over flight permissions but the project has potential applications for developed nations with widespread internet access as well because the balloons live in the stratosphere they have a unique advantage over terrestrial Internet infrastructure there's no weather in the stratosphere which means if there is a hurricane or a typhoon that knocks out power or Internet connectivity to people on the ground even in places like Japan or China or other places around the world the balloons provide a very exciting ways to immediately let people have connectivity 10 seconds after the natural disaster curves as long as I have a battery-powered phone in their pocket people will be able to instantly get access to the balloon network sometimes people think of Google X as a research lab that's not necessarily a business but that's not true all of the projects on Google X have to have a business plan a business case and the business case for Project loon is really exciting it's still early stages in our project in terms of figuring out how big it can grow it's great for bringing Internet to four billion people on earth who don't have it and bring all the benefits education medical information or weather reports but it's also a business in itself a very good business if many of these 4 billion people even paying what they can afford one or two percent of their monthly income can now afford to have Internet and it's a very good business in itself increasing the internet penetration by 10% in a country will increase the GDP by about 1.4 percent per year so in many ways technologies that can increase internet penetration of 10 or 20 percent can double the growth of standard of living of half the countries in the world but this thing yeah