Google’s Project Loon to take up Indonesian skies

“Soon we hope many more millions of people in Indonesia will be able to use the full Internet to bring their culture and businesses online and explore the world even without leaving home”, Project Loon vice president Mike Cassidy said. Sending internet balloons into the stratosphere is much easier.

The tests next year will be with Indosat, Telkomsel and XL Axiata, Cassidy said, calling it “a key milestone for the Loon team as we continue to test, learn and expand the project”.

According to the company, only about one in three of the country’s 250 million residents has internet access, and setting up and maintaining mobile towers across the archipelago has proven to be challenging. Internet penetration is low in Indonesia and existing connection is incredibly slow compared to modern standard. It’s using balloons to transmit the service because frequency bands deliver better coverage from the sky (18-20 km above the ground). The signal travels through the balloon network from balloon to balloon, then to a ground-based station connected to an Internet service provider (ISP), then onto the global Internet.

On Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in Delhi that his company, which has about 130 million users in India, aims to connect the other 1 billion people in the country who don’t have access to the Internet yet, to bring to them the opportunities of education, health information and other benefits that the Internet can bring.

Indonesia’s geography makes it a ideal candidate for the program – being made up of over 17,000 islands, it’s just too darn tricky to implement traditional broadband and telecoms infrastructure.

The biggest advantage Project Loon has over satellite based Internet system is the comparative cheapness compared to satellites. In a separate initiative, Google announced to provide high-speed public Wi-Fi access at 400 railway stations in India.

Project Loon has already entered a collaboration with the government of Sri Lanka and signed a memorandum in regard with this project, as an important but cautious step of the process. It was not revealed how many balloons would be launched in the country.