Google Wants to Provide Internet Access to Remote Parts of the World with Solar-Powered Balloons

Per­haps you live in a devel­oped nation, or a pock­et of a devel­op­ing nation, where inter­net access is a rel­a­tive­ly cheap com­mod­i­ty. Count your­self lucky. Right now, 5 bil­lion peo­ple — or two thirds of the world’s pop­u­la­tion — lack access to an afford­able and reli­able Inter­net con­nec­tion. Which means they lack access to crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion — med­ical infor­ma­tion that can save lives; sci­en­tif­ic infor­ma­tion that can improve farm­ing; tech­ni­cal infor­ma­tion nec­es­sary to build a mod­ern econ­o­my; and edu­ca­tion­al resources that can cul­ti­vate young minds.

With Project Loon, Google is launch­ing an auda­cious exper­i­ment that will hope­ful­ly make a dent in this seri­ous prob­lem. The exper­i­ment involves putting a fleet of high-alti­tude bal­loons into the air. Pow­ered sole­ly by the wind and the sun, the bal­loons will fly high into the stratos­phere, well above where com­mer­cial planes fly, and they’ll beam Inter­net access back to the ground “at speeds sim­i­lar to today’s 3G net­works or faster,” claims Google’s main blog. (The clip below explains the gist of the tech­nol­o­gy.) Right now, they’re run­ning a small scale test in New Zealand (in Christchurch and Can­ter­bury, to be exact) and you can mon­i­tor the progress over at Project Loon’s Google Plus page. In the mean­time, we’ll keep our fin­gers crossed and hope the entire world can soon enjoy our col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es, not to men­tion the oth­er ran­dom curiosi­ties found on the web.