Back in the day, we all had to access the Internet through our telephone landlines.
But soon, thanks to a new project from Google, you might find yourself accessing the Internet with the help of a ... balloon?
where physical wires were difficult or too costly to install, or were just too remote for consistent reception.
Here's a look at the earlier phases of the project that used remote-controlled balloons (like weather balloons, not the birthday kind) in place of traditional landlines or satellites to broadcast LTE cellular service (that's the same kind of signal that pings your cellphone and lets you play Farmville on the road):
After success from the experiments in New Zealand, Sri Lanka is slated to be the first country to offer balloon-based Internet access to everyone.
— a significant step up from the
utility, allowing local Internet service providers to purchase access for their subscribers.
Project Loon essentially uses weather balloons as satellites. The balloons broadcast 3G network access from the stratosphere (fancy!) to remote locations that otherwise can't get coverage.
(about 12 miles up from the surface of the Earth, which is way higher than your next cross-country flight)
Regular Internet access is still only available to about a third of the world's population, but experiments like Project Loon are helping to connect people across the globe.
embedded lives that it's difficult to imagine a world without it — and yet, that's how two-thirds of the world lives each and every day. You know those computer kiosks at your local library? (You have been to your local library, yes?) In some countries, that's one of the only places people can get online. And there are countries where you can't even do
page load times and how annoying it is when Netflix takes 20 seconds to buffer, think about all the information you can find online with just a tap of your finger. That resource is only going to get richer as we more people in it.
Thumbnail image by Tiago Queiroz/AFP/Getty Images.
No comments:
Post a Comment