Google”s Broadband Balloons Bring Coverage to Sri Lanka”

You likely remember Google’s stratospheric balloon-powered internet distribution initiative known as Project Loon.

The Sri Lanka deal aims at providing affordable, high-speed Internet to the country’s citizens, and to do this Google will also be granting access to local service providers with the goal of improving their services, cutting down costs and end-user prices.

The Canadian-raised Palihapitiya was born in Sri Lanka, but it’s not clear what his role was in the Google Loon talks there. Since Google will have to work closely with the country’s local ISPs for the same, end users are expected to be charged a certain amount to gain Internet access. Sri Lanka thus hopes to become the first country in the region with complete internet coverage, The Star reports, citing Sri Lanka’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Mangala Samaraweera.

With the instant approval of the president, an agreement between the state-owned Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) and Google was signed at the prime minister’s house in Colombo on Tuesday.

While Project Loon itself is several years old, having been first tested in New Zealand back in 2013, Google’s agreement with Sri Lanka marks the first wide-scale application of the system, and vaults the small South Asian nation into the internet history books as a result.

And concluded his speech saying that he was “proud to declare that we are at the cusp of a reclaiming our heritage of being connected to each other and connected to the world”.

Official figures show there are 2.8 million mobile Internet connections and 606,000 fixed line Internet subscribers among Sri Lanka’s more than 20 million population. In a few months we will truly be able to say: “Sri Lanka covered”.