Alphabet Inc said on Thursday that artificial intelligence-infused navigation software has significantly speeded up plans to deploy Project Loon Internet balloons to serve remote regions of the world.
Being able to more smartly guide high-altitude balloons promises to improve coverage, while curbing costs as Loon hits headwinds in some locales where it has been testing the technology.
“Out time lines are starting to move up on how we can do more for the world sooner,” said Astro Teller, who heads the team at the Alphabet unit X, which is in charge of the “moonshot” projects of the technology giant.
Photo: AFP
“We are looking to move quickly, but to move thoughtfully,” Teller told a small group of reporters inside a former Silicon Valley shopping center transformed into a “moonshot factory.”
The acceleration was due to software leaps that allow Internet-serving balloons to ride high-altitude winds to ideal locations or loop in patterns that create consistent webs of Internet coverage in the sky.
“We’ve been working to make the balloons smarter; almost like a game of chess with the winds,” Teller said.
He expected Loon to be partnering in coming months with telecoms to provide Internet to “real users,” in a step up from tests done to see how well the high-floating technology works with networks on the ground.
Teller declined to specify where Loon might first be integrated into telecommunications networks providing services to customers.
“We are not going to all of a sudden be everywhere,” Teller said. “We intend to be part of an ecosystem — in any country where we are doing testing we would work with a local telco.”
Part of the money-making vision for Loon would be to get revenue from telecoms for extending their reach.
Teller said Loon is one of the more mature projects at X and that it “would be a natural state to graduate into its own company,” but there were not plans at the moment for that to happen.
The peek inside the X lab and word of speedy progress came the same day that the venture to beam the Internet to the ground via balloon hit a legal snag in Sri Lanka that could see the project abandoned in the nation.
Project Loon uses roaming balloons to beam Internet coverage and planned to connect Sri Lanka’s 21 million people to the Web, even those in remote connectivity black spots, but just a year after testing began in Sri Lanka regulators have been unable to allocate Google a radio frequency for the airborne venture without breaching international regulations.
“There are lots of places excited to run experiments with us,” Teller said. “We encourage that, but there are lots of agencies and we need to dot i’s and cross t’s.”
Teller added that Project Loon planned to “do things by the book” in any nation where it is active, using balloons to get Internet signals far and wide, while local telecoms tap into the network from the ground.
The first public launch of Loon took place in New Zealand in 2013, when the project was in an early experimental phase.
Alphabet recently said that it gave up on its Internet drone project, Titan, about a year ago to focus its resources on Loon, where it saw more promise of success.
The economics and technical feasibility of balloons are seen as a more promising way to connect rural and remote parts of the world to the Internet, it said.
PATENTS: MediaTek Inc said it would not comment on ongoing legal cases, but does not expect the legal action by Huawei to affect its business operations Smartphone integrated chips designer MediaTek Inc (聯發科) on Friday said that a lawsuit filed by Chinese smartphone brand Huawei Technologies Co (華為) over alleged patent infringements would have little impact on its operations. In an announcement posted on the Taiwan Stock Exchange, MediaTek said that it would not comment on an ongoing legal case. However, the company said that Huawei’s legal action would have little impact on its operations. MediaTek’s statement came after China-based PRIP Research said on Thursday that Huawei filed a lawsuit with a Chinese district court claiming that MediaTek infringed on its patents. The infringement mentioned in the lawsuit likely involved
Taipei is today suspending work, classes and its US$2.4 trillion stock market as Typhoon Gaemi approaches Taiwan with strong winds and heavy rain. The nation is not conducting securities, currency or fixed income trading, statements from its stock and currency exchanges said. Authorities had yesterday issued a warning that the storm could affect people on land and canceled some ship crossings and domestic flights. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) expects its local chipmaking fabs to maintain normal production, the company said in an e-mailed statement. The main chipmaker for Apple Inc and Nvidia Corp said it has activated routine typhoon alert
GROWTH: TSMC increased its projected revenue growth for this year to more than 25 percent, citing stronger-than-expected demand for AI devices and smartphones The Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER, 台灣經濟研究院) yesterday raised its forecast for Taiwan’s GDP growth this year from 3.29 percent to 3.85 percent, as exports and private investment recovered faster than it predicted three months ago. The Taipei-based think tank also expects that Taiwan would see a 8.19 percent increase in exports this year, better than the 7.55 percent it projected in April, as US technology giants spent more money on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and development. “There will be more AI servers going forward, but it remains to be seen if the momentum would extend to personal computers, smartphones and
Catastrophic computer outages caused by a software update from one company have once again exposed the dangers of global technological dependence on a handful of players, experts said on Friday. A flawed update sent out by the little-known security firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc brought airlines, TV stations and myriad other aspects of daily life to a standstill. The outages affected companies or individuals that use CrowdStrike on the Microsoft Inc’s Windows platform. When they applied the update, the incompatible software crashed computers into a frozen state known as the “blue screen of death.” “Today CrowdStrike has become a household name, but not in