Project Loon: Balloons to bring connectivity back to disaster-hit Puerto Rico

​Google’s parent company Alphabet is working to bring emergency connectivity to Puerto Rico, using high altitude balloons.

According to Wired, the company’s ‘Project Loon’ initiative will help replace thousands of cellular data towers that were knocked out of service on the Caribbean island during the recent hurricane.

Alphabet are working with existing wireless carriers in Puerto Rico to restore limited communications to the island. “Loon needs be integrated with a telco partner’s network—the balloons can’t do it alone,” said the project's spokesperson.

The initiative aims to provide internet to the half of the world’s population that currently lack it. It uses balloons that float 20km above the earth and act as relays between ground stations and users’ devices.

The technology was recently used in the aftermath of flooding in Peru. In Puerto Rico, 30 balloons will be used, with each capable of covering 1,930 square miles, but it’s unclear when the service will be up and running. “We’re sorting through a lot of possible options now and are grateful for the support we’re getting on the ground,” said the spokesperson.

The balloon technology is a creative solution, ideally suited to the challenges on the ground in Puerto Rico, said Nisanth Sastry, a senior lecturer at King’s College London’s Centre for Telecommunications Research. “Loon gives you flexibility of where this cellular infrastructure is, so you can direct more resources to the places where they are needed,” he told Professional Engineering.

The biggest challenge, said Sastry, is managing the ‘back haul’ – processing and transmitting the data from the balloons back to servers where it can be handled – but that’s not an issue if you just want to link up emergency services at a local level. “If it’s simply a matter of local users, this is exactly the right solution,” he said.

In the long-term, it’s not a replacement for fixed infrastructure because of the logistics of creating enough bandwidth for everyone, but in the weeks and months after a disaster it provides much needed flexibility. “There’s a lot of engineering effort involved in making this work on a moving infrastructure,” said Sastry.