Today, Loon is announcing a partnership with Canadian telecommunications company Telesat, in a deal that will see Loon’s custom software service for managing its LTE balloon fleet be put to use controlling Telesat’s new constellation of Low Earth orbit satellites.
It’s part of Loon’s realization that no one solution will get internet everywhere across the globe, and that its technology can benefit a major player in an industry it once viewed as a potential competitor.
Loon has spent a majority of its existence as a Alphabet-funded project developing this software, and its become an instrumental system for controlling the network traffic for Loon’s LTE service in areas like Brazil, Peru, and elsewhere around the globe where the company has performed field tests.
Around 3.5 billion people, or a bit under half the world’s population, don’t have access to the internet, according to the 2018 Global Digital report.
Today, current options for bringing remote areas online, like geostationary satellites that sit more than 20,000 miles above the surface, provide ample coverage area, but suffer from high latency and sluggish connection speeds. They’re also immensely difficult and expensive to maintain. For companies like Loon and Telesat, newer solutions ranging from satellites in Low Earth orbit — a more cost effective and lower latency portion of space — to stratospheric balloons and airships are necessary to begin bridging the gap. And it’s no longer about providing a single, one-size-fits-all solution, but a patchwork of different approaches all targeting different segments of the connectivity problem.
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