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Google’s ambitious Loon internet balloon project has crash-landed

Google’s ambitious Loon internet balloon project has crash-landed

Google X’s bet was to use balloons to reach a larger percentage of unconnected people, mostly in the rural areas. The technology worked by floating internet-connected balloons into the stratosphere and serving as an option for local telecoms companies to reach more customers with internet access rather than have to spend the hundreds of million dollars required to build out a physical internet backbone to reach a relatively small number of people in each remote area. In Africa, Loon’s experiment was run in Kenya in partnership with Telkom Kenya, Kenya’s third largest mobile network.