The guys from Project Loon didn’t expect to come this far. They certainly didn’t think an idea as crazy as beaming WiFi with balloons would even work.

In their own words, “It’s still a surprise to many of us that Loon is looking as promising as it is; for years, the team focused their efforts on proving that Loon wouldn’t work. Even the Project name tells you that our mindset when we got started was more “worth a shot” rather than “this could work.””

In case you haven’t heard much about Loon. Project Loon is basically a fleet of balloons acting almost like cell towers – except they are flying in the stratosphere. The project aim was to extend Internet connectivity to more than half of the world’s population living in rural or remote areas with no Internet access.

According to their project website, “High speed internet is transmitted up to the nearest balloon from our telecommunications partner on the ground, relayed across the balloon network, and then back down to users on the ground.” They claimed to have proved connection speeds up to 10Mbps directly to LTE phones, and data transmissions between balloons over 100km apart in the stratosphere.

Few companies can claim that vision and have enough cash flow to sustain a project at this size. However, when you’re Alphabet, the parent company of Google, you can afford a few ideas that are as crazy as this. And when the project exceeds your expectation, that’s when out of the blue, it becomes an innovation, making it seems like the future is bright.

The project was conceptualised in 2011, and the first sizeable test was carried out in 2013. Initially the plan was to create a fixed ring of balloons sailing around the globe. Now, nearly 4 years later, the team can control and form clusters over specific regions that require internet access. They still need to improve the navigation algorithms and conduct tests in many parts of the world – not mentioning drawing up partner contracts will telcos around the world; it certainly looks like connectivity isn’t just a privilege of the cities.

As written by Astro Teller, “Captain of Moonshots” for X (X is  the R&D company under Alphabet), “No one could have pretended to know how to build a network of free-flying, high-altitude balloons that could beam Internet to the earth below, and if we’d known how hard it was going to be, we probably never would have tried.”

While that may be the case, it certainly looks like this idea might soon become reality, and perhaps normalised. Maybe some of our local telcos can boost their reliability with this?

You can read more about the Project Loon, the technology and how it works, or the blog post that notes details on the progress on the project. 

CNET also wrote a very detailed inside look at their factory.