Delivering Adequate Bandwidth Over Long Distances Yet, while Project Loon’s balloons and ’s drones won’t need networking equipment nearly as powerful as what we built for the military, they will still face significant challenges creating networks that float above the clouds and that are suitable for providing internet access to remote populations. This was something that had never been achieved before. The technology was capable of sending large amounts of data - from 10 Gbps up to 80 Gbps - between moving aircraft or between aircraft and ground stations up to 200 kilometers away. Several years ago, our engineering team, consisting of leading aerospace engineers, optics experts and computer scientists, successfully developed the first ultra-high bandwidth wireless network in the sky under contract with the U.S. While such a network may seem fantastical, the concept of an airborne-based network isn’t all that far-fetched.

But are such networks just hype or could they really work? How Viable Are Airborne Networks? Such a network would be far less expensive, far less disruptive and take far less time to build than implementing a wired / land based infrastructure over very large swaths of the earth where no communications infrastructure currently exists. The benefits of an all-wireless network in the sky are clear. is taking a similar approach, except instead of balloons, it envisions using drones as the delivery platform. The signal bounces from this antenna up to the balloon network, and then down to the global Internet on Earth. As Google describes it, “People can connect to the balloon network using a special Internet antenna attached to their building. Project Loon plans to bring internet access to remote locations via a network of high-altitude balloons.

Recently, though, two initiatives - Google’s Project Loon and Mark Zuckerberg’s - have drawn widespread attention to the challenge of using alternative delivery platforms to bring low cost broadband access to unserved or underserved parts of the world. As the World Economic Forum highlighted in a report earlier this year, while our increasingly hyperconnected world brings many benefits, it also exacerbates inequalities for those large portions of the global population that have limited or no internet access.

Drone station network