Project Loon, through which Alphabet intended to provide the Internet through a series of hot air balloons, was shut down last year.
This closure of the cycle did not imply a total extinction of the project. Now, under the aegis of a new company, the technology associated with Loon abandoned floating platforms and implemented lasers and cloud communication, in order to deliver the Internet, especially in remote areas.
A new project inherited and rethought the technology of Project Loon
The company heir to Google’s technology is called Aalyria, as reported by CNBC. The North American media reported that Alphabet has a minority stake in this new entity, which is not listed as a direct subsidiary of Google’s parent company.
Aalyria works with two main projects: Tightbeam, which is a communication system based on laser beams, to transmit data between base stations and terminals; and Spacetime, cloud-based software to keep connections always on.
The synergy between both projects lies in the fact that Spacetime will be in charge of predicting when a Tightbeam station, be it terrestrial or satellite, needs to transfer connectivity to some moving object, such as any kind of vehicle.
According to Bloomberg, Aalyria is currently commercializing its software and has plans to sell the Tightbeam hardware starting next year, either as a complete package or separately, as Spacetime can theoretically be used on other platforms, in addition to systems based on Spacetime. in laser.
The laser system proposed by Aalyria performs data transmission in a similar way to fiber optics, radiating light from one point to another. Since this link is only done wirelessly, rather than through a physical connection (such as a cable), it can be leveraged over long distances. On this, the company stated in a press release that its system is “100 to 1000 times faster than anything currently available”.
An interesting fact, which Bloomberg points out in his report, is that the technology behind Tightbeam also arose from an old Google project, called Sonora, which had not previously been discussed in public.
The Aalyria thing is a novel proposal that, if materialized in the terms under which it was presented, could compete commercially with SpaceX. For now, it is a project still in an emerging phase, with only 26 people working on it.
