Google parent company Alphabet's ambitious Project Loon idea is one step closer to achieving its goal of delivering Internet to underserved areas via balloons.
In a Thursday blog post, Astro Teller, head of Alphabet's X team in charge of the company's moonshot projects, said the folks working on Project Loon recently had a "magical, serendipitous" discovery that pushed the initiative forward in a big way.
"They've now exceeded even their own expectations for how well their smart software algorithms can help their balloons navigate the globe, and in the process they've leapt much closer to a day when balloon-powered Internet could become a reality for people in rural and remote regions of the globe," he wrote.
The machine-learning-powered algorithms can now "send small teams of balloons to form a cluster over a specific region where people need Internet access." That's a departure from the team's original plan to create "rings of balloons" around the globe that would drift with the wind. The original idea was that as one balloon drifted out of range of a specific region, another would float along to take its place.
Now, the balloons can "dance on the winds in small loops to remain where needed," Teller explained.
There's several benefits to this approach.
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"We'll be able to put together a Loon network over a particular region in weeks not months, and it would be a lot less work to launch and manage," Teller wrote. "We'll reduce the number of balloons we need and get greater value out of each one. All of this helps reduce the costs of operating a Loon-powered network."
But he cautioned: while this is a positive sign, there's still a lot of work to be done. The navigation algorithms still need improvement, and the Loon team needs to test them more extensively.
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