Alphabet’s Project Loon has just started and is expanding into another country soon.
Sergey Brin and VP of Project Loon Mike Cassidy announced the expansion to Indonesia at a press conference in Mountain View, CA, noting that Google has worked with Indonesian President Joko Widodo to get the project of the ground. The new parent company of Google said that it is teaming up with the three largest wireless carriers in Indonesia to test its Project Loon in Indonesia beginning next year.
Google is targeting Indonesia because it is the fourth most populous country in the world. Partnering with Indosat, Telkomsel, and XL Axiata, the provided Internet will be fast enough to do essentially anything on the web, including streaming videos.
Project Loon is an initiative to bring balloon-delivered internet access to remote areas and developing countries, bringing online to more than four billion people around the globe without internet access. More internet users translates to more users of Alphabet products and services. Google’s Android operating system has been the most dominant mobile software among developing countries that prefer low-cost handsets.
Google’s program aims to transmit high-speed Internet signals from clusters of balloons floating about 60,000 feet above the Earth. From there, the signal can bounce among various balloons and blanket otherwise dead sections of the country with what mobile phone owners will see as a standard Wi-Fi network, according to The Verge.
The download speeds will be up to 10Mbps, which is only 1Mbps below the average speed in the United States as of August 2015. Project Loon tea says that an air-based satellite network is especially useful in a country like Indonesia as the country stretches more than 740,000 miles across 17,000 islands.
Other prolific companies like Facebook has the same goal. Facebook has an initiative of its own, planning to use drones instead of balloons. Also, Space X CEO Elon Musk plans to launch clusters of cheap, low-flying satellites to beam the Internet around the world.
The team handling the project started the tests two years ago in New Zealand and has since expanded into Brazil and California's Central Valley. Earlier this year, Alphabet also announced a partnership with Sri Lanka to bring Project Loon to the country, 9to5Google reported.