Alphabet has announced it will shutting down Loon, its project to bring internet to hard-to-reach places using balloons 20 km in the air, saying it was just not commercially viable. The project, unveiled in June 2013, will now be winding down and no longer be included in results as Other Bet. “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,” Loon Chief Executive Alastair Westgarth said in a blog post.
Rich DeVaul, a founder of the project who is no longer with Alphabet, added that surging demand for mobile connectivity made towers cost-effective in more of the world than he had estimated a decade ago, diminishing the need for Loon. “The problem got solved faster than we thought,” he said in an interview, Reuters reported. Westgarth said Loon’s legacy would include advancing helium balloons to last hundreds of days in the sky and developing communications equipment that could deliver cell coverage across an area 200 times bigger than an average tower can.
The loon team will move on over the coming months, finding new roles at X, Google and Alphabet. A small group will stay to ensure Loon’s operations are wrapped up smoothly and safely. This will include winding down Loon’s pilot service in Kenya. The company added however that it is still committed to connectivity and has pledged a fund of USD 10 million to support nonprofits and business focused on connectivity, the internet, entrepreneurship and education in Kenya.
The company also said it hopes Loon can be a “stepping stone” to future technologies and businesses that can fill in blank spots on the globe’s map of connectivity. It will therefore explore options to take some of Loon’s technology forward, either with telecom firms, mobile network operators, city and country governments, NGOs or other tech companies. Some of Loon’s technology, like the high bandwidth (20Gbps+) optical communication links that were first used to beam a connection between balloons in the stratosphere, already live on in Project Taara. This team is currently working with partners in Sub-Saharan Africa to bring affordable, high-speed internet to unconnected and under-connected communities starting in Kenya.
