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Project Loon

google.com

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Re: Project Loon

#261

Post by marcamillion »

macspoofing wrote: post #220
marcamillion wrote: post #80

Wow....this is mind-blowing. The potential impact of a globally connected internet is crazy. No longer can a country fully filter/control all internet traffic. This could be a major boon to democracy. I wonder if Google did this, partially to piss China off. This seems like an awesome way to get around the 'Great Firewall'.

>This seems like an awesome way to get around the 'Great Firewall'. Who says you can deploy them over china?

>Who says you can deploy them over china?

Who says you can't? As far as it seems, it will be circling Earth in low-orbit. Not sure China could stop them if they wanted to.

Re: Project Loon

#262

Post by millstone »

shantanubala wrote: post #161
bayesianhorse wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building computer networks and artificial intelligence are pretty much Google's core competencies. Most if not all other companies would struggle to fund and develop this project. First of all, the system is in total very expensive: You don't get any coverage with just a few baloons, you probably need hundreds to make any of them stay connected to the rest of the internet most of the time. Second, this system is extr…

> This is a very exciting problem once you think about it... That's a good summary of why Google has been so successful. They have a way of making engineers and regular people really excited about their projects. It's a feedback loop - have exciting stuff, recruit smarter people, work on more exciting stuff.

Google has many exciting projects, but those are not responsible for its success. Google's success is owed to comparatively pedestrian products: a search engine and an ad brokerage.

Take away Glass, self driving cars, Loon, and all the other blue sky projects, and you still have a wildly successful company. But take away those two cash cows and Google is broke.

Re: Project Loon

#263

Post by acchow »

sshconnection wrote: post #237
vinceguidry wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a hack for the use case of basic connectivity. Your cell phone connects to a cell tower, which in turn connects to a trunk line. That's the proper way to do wireless. In the developing world, cell towers connect to other cell towers wirelessly. That's a hack. It's the reason why hotel Internet blows. Not its proper use case, engineering-wise. Service sucks but the customer base isn't discerning enough to notice…

Maybe you just had a bad experience with your provider in Atlanta. Webpass in SF is pretty awesome. 200mbps for 50/mo.

Clear Internet is 4G. He was giving an example of how "wireless is a hack". As far as I can tell from their website, Webpass is wired.

Re: Project Loon

#264

Post by sytelus »

rayiner wrote: post #250
simonsarris wrote: post #12

"I love those who yearn for the impossible." -Goethe I wish other large companies showed such ambition. Telecoms like AT&T can't even be bothered to roll out the network upgrades they promised in the early 2000's.

Most large companies don't have the financial flexibility that Google's near-monopoly on search offers. Lots of ten-billion per year in revenue companies are eking out 5% margins in extremely competitive fields and can't afford to be distracted by ambitious projects. AT&T is locked in tight competition with Verizon in a very capital-intensive market, and can't afford to divert capital to blue-sky projects. Back when…

That's pretty weak defense of AT&T. They have 250,000+ employees. They spent half a billion dollors in alternative fuel vehicles investments in 2011 alone. They have 20B of total capital investment a year. Blue sky projects such as Loon typically takes couple of dozen employees and may be few million dollars to kick off - small enough to be rounding errors in AT&T's budgets. If I have to imagine, the reason AT&T doesn't do this is probably because (1) their leadership has lost habits of innovative/creative envisioning (2) their leadership probably laughed this off because potential for revenue from people in Sahara was not very tempting (3) Their middle management is not empowered or willing enough to paddle such ideas to top in the first place (4) They simply doesn't have setup where bottom-up vision is possible anymore so unless leadership envisions it and executes, it doesn't get done.

The lack of money and employees is probably the last thing that would prevent AT&T to do these kind of projects.

Re: Project Loon

#266

Post by randomafrican »

vinceguidry wrote: post #104
eaurouge wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The long game is being fully wired. No, the long game is wireless communications (and renewable energy). One of the reasons for fast growth in some developing countries is the fact that they don't have to make the same investments in infrastructure that developed countries made in the past.

Wireless is a hack, it will never replace wired. Sure, in Africa they get online with mobile phones, but that's only because it's not profitable _yet_ to run landlines. Even 56K would be better than mobile, but since it's Africa they don't even have that. Give it a few more decades and they'll be wired just like everyone else.

>Sure, in Africa they get online with mobile phones, but that's only because it's not profitable _yet_ to run landlines.

I'm not sure it will be ever be profitable to run landlines. The big issue being that there wont never be public and private monopolies again and that you dont run a line to a single costumer.

Re: Project Loon

#269

Post by bayesianhorse »

millstone wrote: post #262
shantanubala wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a very exciting problem once you think about it... That's a good summary of why Google has been so successful. They have a way of making engineers and regular people really excited about their projects. It's a feedback loop - have exciting stuff, recruit smarter people, work on more exciting stuff.

Google has many exciting projects, but those are not responsible for its success. Google's success is owed to comparatively pedestrian products: a search engine and an ad brokerage. Take away Glass, self driving cars, Loon, and all the other blue sky projects, and you still have a wildly successful company. But take away those two cash cows and Google is broke.

I think you are misunderstanding google. For one thing, search engines and their Ad system is the same class of problem as the Loon project: Large Scale stochastic computation.

On the other hand there is no telling what sorts of massive successes will come out of Google. They will have their stakes in any mass-produced self-driving car, Google Glass is at least going somewhere, and Android is already very popular and enabling Google to get Ad revenue without being fought by Apple every inch of their way.

The stock price and market capitalization is driven both by current revenue but more so by these insane projects and the probability that there will be another big success.

Re: Project Loon

#270

Post by galactus »

temp453463343 wrote: post #51
ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #19

It's fascinating to see how well Google has branched out. It started as just a search engine competing with Lycos, AltaVista, & Yahoo and yet they didn't just stop, they kept going. They built all these new services & products around their core product (search) and it's paid off tremendously. It's definitely something to model future companies off of. When you win the race, don't stop, keep running.

Almost everything they're done is centered around ads and getting more data on their users to sell more ads. Even this project, in the end it's about getting more people online to look at their ads. (not sure how much ad revenue you can get from poor places, but whatever) EDIT: To those saying they're playing the long game; Playing the long game doesn't make sense. The long game is being fully wired. By the time poor…

> The long game is being fully wired. By the time poor > areas become economically important enough to be > advertised to, they will have traditional telecoms > servicing them.

... And by that time, they will all be users of the google ecosystem thanks to this.

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