Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Beijing, September 13 (Xinhua) Google tried to use Loon, a high-altitude balloon project, to provide Internet access to remote areas, but the project was shut down last year because it failed to find a viable business model.

However, the related technology has been spun off to a startup that has abandoned the idea of a floating platform and instead used laser and cloud technology to provide the Internet to remote areas.

▲ Google's former high-altitude balloon project

The company, called Aalyria, inherits Google's high-altitude balloon Internet technology. Although Google's parent company, Alphabet, has a minority stake in the company, it is no longer a direct subsidiary of Alphabet.

At present, Aalyria is very small, with only 26 people. While it has the right to use Google's technology, there is a difference between developing and testing cool technology and actually being able to use it in the real world, a lesson Google found in its own high-altitude balloon pilot commercial service in Kenya. However, the idea is clearly interesting enough to attract some investors, including the U.S. Department of Defense. Aalyria said it had won a $8.7 million commercial contract from the Defense Department's innovation department.

Aalyria has two business priorities: one is the laser communications system Tightbeam, which uses beams to transmit data between base stations and endpoints, and the other is cloud-based software Spacetime, which handles changing connections. The initial role of Spacetime is to predict how Loon balloons will move and to maintain a close relationship between them. Now, its job is to predict when Tightbeam base stations (either ground-based or satellite-based) must disconnect from moving objects such as aircraft or ships.

Tightbeam aims to achieve data transmission in a way that is very similar to optical fiber, transmitting light beams from one point to another. However, it is transmitted through air rather than through a physical connection, which obviously makes it more flexible, especially over long distances. Aalyria claims that the transmission speed of the system is amazing: "10-1000 times faster than any system currently available". Aalyria says it can send data at 1.6Tb per second (terabits) within hundreds of miles, which would be about 1000 times faster than similar technologies currently in use.

Aalyria is currently selling its software and plans to sell Tightbeam hardware next year. In theory, the two can work together or alone. Spacetime is not limited to laser-based systems.

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