Google has shut down its Loon project, which hoped to make giant helium balloons an alternative to cell towers in remote areas of the world.
Alphabet Inc, Google’s parent company, said Loon is not commercially viable, nearly ten years after it was launched to bring the internet to rural areas where building cell towers is too expensive or too difficult due to lack of roads.
Loon aimed to bring connectivity to remote areas hard to reach, using high-altitude helium balloons.
“While we’ve found a number of willing partners along the way, we haven’t found a way to get the costs low enough to build a long-term, sustainable business,” Loon CEO Alastair Westgarth wrote in a blog post.
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