At last we get to know more details about Google’s new Project Loon — An ambitious project to use balloons to bring internet access to remote regions of the world where its impossible to have connectivity to the Internet.
The search giant has a solution for that, of course. The Project Loon team says it could use wind currents at different levels of the stratosphere to control where balloons move and insure that the “flock” remains evenly spaced out. That, in turn, would made sure that people down below don’t have to wait for one of the airborne antennas to pass overhead before loading the internet.
According to Dan Piponi of Project Loon the technique by showing off some (very cool) simulations in a video released this week to explain the issue. They had to use publicly-available wind data, to show how balloons can know when to increase or decrease in altitude to catch the current and stay in the right place. The flock itself would continue to travel across the world — most of the winds in the stratosphere travel west to east — but a steady stream of balloons, equally spaced out, could maintain stable internet access in areas targeted by the program.
