In early 2021, Alphabet shut down Loon. It was a familiar story in the annals of Google X history: an ambitious moonshot with tremendous upside that fizzled before gaining any kind of meaningful traction after nearly a decade.
“Despite Loon’s extraordinary technical progress,” X explains with a tinge of melancholy in the page of the previous project“the path to commercial viability turned out to be much longer and more dangerous than expected, so in 2021 the Loon’s journey came to an end.”
The project used weather balloons to deliver high-speed internet to places that lack infrastructure like sub-Saharan Africa. Loon has attracted a lot of interest and seen its use after natural disasters such as the hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico in 2017.
Some of Loon’s foundational technologies carry over into other Alphabet projects. Its spirit, meanwhile, is maintained by Airbus through ALTO. Where Loon relied on balloons, however, the newest project uses solar-powered Zephyr drones.
“[Loon] it got really good customer engagement,” AALTO CEO Samer Hallawi told TechCrunch in a sit-down interview last week at Mobile World Congress. “They got people signed up to the service very quickly. What did happen, though, was that balloons were released. What they did to overcome this was they used multiple balloons and carried a signal from one to the other. They ended up using the balloons eight times to cover the same area.”
AALTO relies on fixed-wing drones, which are—at least—more predictable in their movements than weather balloons. Airbus acquired the technology for the fixed-wing unmanned aircraft from UK Ministry of Defense and Space spinoff QinetiQ in 2013.
Zephyrs take off from a circular runway, ascending in an ever-expanding spiral. Drones reach the stratosphere above 60,000 feet. This keeps them above commercial aircraft, as well as weather that can block solar coverage. As it turns out, the airspace is also not regulated nearly as much as those below it.
According to AALTO figures, each drone can cover up to 7,500 square kilometers of land surface – or the equivalent of up to 250 cell towers. Once airborne, the system can run for months on solar power alone. Every six months or so, the system will land for a battery change, as they still have a limited lifespan.
AALTO’s go to market includes agreements with carriers as well as government agencies. Like Loon before it, the company is also exploring the temporary deployment of cell towers that have collapsed after natural disasters.
