Google’s parent company is letting the air out on a project to provide more remote areas with internet access using massive balloons after the project was unable to reduce its sky-high costs.
Alphabet launched Loon in 2011 to connect the 3.8 billion people who, by Loon’s estimate, live in hard-to-reach areas where internet providers have found it too cost-prohibitive to install traditional ground-based network systems. The project relied on sending gas-filled polyethylene balloons as large as tennis courts more than 60,000 feet into the sky, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The project was successful — the satellite-style equipment attached to the balloons was able to deliver mobile internet coverage to more than 11,000 square kilometers with a single balloon, an area 200 times larger than traditional cellphone towers.
“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,” CEO Alastair Westgarth wrote in a Medium post. “Developing radical new technology is inherently risky, but that doesn’t make breaking this news any easier. Today, I’m sad to share that Loon will be winding down.”
Loon was one of Alphabet’s “Other Bets” initiatives, the lesser-known companies beyond Alphabet’s staples such as Google and YouTube that work on innovative “moonshot projects,” according to a 2015 annual report after the company restructured.
Alphabet’s other projects include Waymo, a self-driving car project, Wing Aviation, a drone delivery service, and Makani Technologies, a renewable energy company, according to Reuters.
Those projects have yet to yield any gains for Alphabet. The projects collectively lost $3.4 billion on an operating basis, according to the Street, prompting some to wonder “why the projects are a worthwhile use of Alphabet’s capital.”
In the blog post, Westgarth praised Loon’s employees for what they were able to accomplish and said he was “immensely proud” of their work.
“From launch to landing, hardware to software and everything in between, the Loon team brought together a world-class group of planners, builders, tinkerers, thinkers, innovators and doers,” Westgarth wrote to Loon’s employees. “We even developed our own experts in entirely new or fledgling fields, like balloon navigation, stratospheric flight, and balloon launching and recovery. … While this isn’t the outcome I envisioned for Loon when I joined four years ago, I continue to be immensely proud of the accomplishments of the entire Loon team and hope that our efforts will live on in ways that we can’t yet imagine.”
