Loon is ready to fly on its own. In a blog post, the head of Alphabet’s X division, Astro Teller, says that the high altitude balloon-based broadband company, and a drone based sister project, Wing, are leaving the incubator…
Today, unlike when they started as X projects, Loon and Wing seem a long way from crazy — and thanks to their years of hard work and relentless testing in the real world, they’re now graduating from X to become two new independent businesses within Alphabet: Loon and Wing.
As Other Bets, they’ll continue the missions they started here at X. Loon will work with mobile network operators globally to bring internet access to unconnected and under-connected people around the world. Wing is building a drone delivery system to improve the speed, cost, and environmental impact of transporting goods, and an unmanned-traffic management platform to safely route drones through our skies.
Loon’s business model remains focused on providing back haul capacity to mobile carriers in rural area, and regions that remote beyond rural. It finished a proof of concept run in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, and by all accounts managed to make things better. It wasn’t a cosmic solution to Puerto Rico’s connectivity problems, but it did fill the sort of gaps that its business plan is targeting, and demonstrated that it’s a useful tool in disaster recovery operations, according to an article in Ars Technica by Nathan Mattise…
“We usually think about [Project Loon] in places with no existent network, but when a network goes out, people who were served become underserved,” says Sal Candido, a director and principal engineer at X…“In the future, being prepared for these kind of things is something we hadn’t really thought of, but it could be done in advance as a contingency.”
The big question that’s still to be answered is whether the willingness of mobile operators to pay matches the cost of Loon’s bandwidth. That’s what will determine if it’s a sustainable business, rather than ad hoc networking tool.