After 18 months of work, Google has launched its first test balloon from a frozen field in New Zealand's South Island, letting it soar into the sky above Lake Tekapo. With this successful launch, the company has taken the first step into getting the entire planet Internet access.
Developed by the same secretive X lab that brought the world the driverless car and the Google Glass, the helium-filled balloons are meant to bounce Internet signals down to receivers in participating houses, allowing anyone within range to have Internet access. The company hopes this will be a quicker and significantly more cost effective method to bring online access to countries like Africa and South Asia than laying fiber cable.
Google released this first balloon but hopes to launch about a thousand more in order to cover the 4.8 billion people in the world who aren't able to connect to the internet according to CBS News.
CBS News also reports the balloons are powered by "card table sized" solar panels capable of getting a day's charge off of 4 hours of sunlight. The balloons will fly 12-miles into the stratosphere, completely out of eyesight. This means terrain and obstacles don't hinder the signal like they would if areas like Afghanistan attempted to lay fiber cable to give the people access to the web. Each unit can cover about 780 square miles, an area twice the size of New York City.
"It's a huge moonshot. A really big goal to go after," project leader Mike Cassidy said. "The power of the Internet is probably one of the most transformative technologies of our time.
The one catch to the Google balloons, that is known so far, is that all users will need to have a receiver plugged into their computer in order to get the signal from any of the Google Balloons.
So far the company isn't talking costs although they have said it will cost less than the price of laying cable.
