Monday, October 09, 2017

send in the... Loons?

the hurricane destroyed some of Puerto Rico's cellphone towers, but someone got an idea how to do a termporary fix:

From PhysOrg:

Google's parent company is set to launch balloons into the Caribbean skies in an attempt to restore telephone networks in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico. Alphabet Inc., which controls Google, obtained authorization from the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to deploy the devices—developed from 2013 as part of a project known as "Loon."
It aims to temporarily re-establish Puerto Rico's cellular network—where 83 per cent of cell sites were still out of service Friday, according to FCC figures...
Initially designed to drift, the balloons are now equipped with navigation systems, powered by solar panels, which keep them in a specific area.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-10-balloons-puerto-rico-cell-networks.html#jCp


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