Alphabet’s Loon Launches Commercial Service in Kenya

Yesterday, Loon announced the launch of its first commercial internet service. The Alphabet division’s high-altitude, solar-powered balloons will provide internet to Telkom Kenya subscribers.

• What’s covered? 50,000 square kilometers across parts of Kenya (roughly the size of Slovakia)
• How many balloons? 35 or more “flight vehicles,” as Loon calls them, will concurrently hang out in the stratosphere.
• Can you hear me now? Video calls and streaming worked in tests.

Making its corporate parent proud

Alphabet’s moonshot factory, X, is kinda like college. Once you graduate, you focus on commercial viability (I don’t make the rules, I just repeat them).

Loon provided service to parts of Peru and Puerto Rico after disasters, but the company highlighted the Kenya launch as “the first non-emergency use of Loon to provide connectivity on a large-scale basis.”

Big picture: Traditional telecoms could eventually connect a chunk of the ~3.2 billion people worldwide without internet access. But at the margins, many will never get increasingly vital coverage this way. From internet balloons to low-earth-orbit satellites, tech companies want to beam connectivity more widely and quickly (and cash in).