Is This Google X's Plan to Wire the World?
By Brad Stone
May 23, 2013
Google (GOOG) Chairman Eric Schmidt’s April 13 tweet was
bold, ambitious, and a bit inexplicable. “For every person online, there are
two that are not,” wrote the co-author of the book The New Digital Age. “By the
end of the decade, everyone on Earth will be connected.”
Commenters were flummoxed by Schmidt’s prediction. There
are many parts of the world without reliable telecommunications infrastructure.
How do you wire parts of Africa—or the Indonesian archipelago?
In my conversations with Astro Teller, Google X’s
excellently named director of moonshots, for this week’s cover story on Google
X, I asked whether extending broadband Internet access throughout the world
would be a problem deserving of attention from the top-secret lab. Teller gave
nothing away, but it was clear from his answer that there’s plenty of passion
for that particular goal inside his organization. “Having everyone connected is
literally in the same category as making clean water available,” he said. “That
sounds like a radical statement but I don’t think that it is. There is now a
ton of evidence that connectivity drives freedom, democracy, economic
development, health, and those things then turn into lower mortality and all of
the things that we are trying to get at here.” Extending connectivity, he
added, “is the most direct way, probably on an order of magnitude, to address
the world’s biggest problems.”
Researchers who have examined the challenge of spreading
Internet access throughout the world usually focus on one of three general
solutions. There’s satellite access, which tends to be slow, expensive, and
doesn’t function well in high-density urban areas. There’s ground-based
wireless broadband, the most conventional solution, but in some parts of the
world the towers where you would mount broadband transmitters would be quickly
scavenged and sold as scrap metal.
And then there’s the unlikeliest but perhaps most
promising approach: sending balloons mounted with broadband antennas into the
stratosphere, where they can rain connectivity down from only 20 kilometers
away. The Europeans tried this a decade ago. Lockheed Martin (LMT) and SoftBank
in Japan have experimented with it more recently, with varying levels of
success. No one has tried to push balloon-based broadband transmitters into
wide production, though. Google X representatives declined to comment on this
particular approach, but it fits well with the lab’s philosophy of moonshot
thinking and its orientation toward practical yet science-fiction-sounding
solutions.
David Grace, a senior research fellow at the University
of York, spearheaded the European project, part of a multi-country initiative
backed by the European Commission. He said that he has indeed heard Google is
working on such a project. “They are highly innovative and very obviously have
the financial resources and are always keen to take risks,” he said. “It does
need the Googles of the world to push this forward.”
Per Lindstrand, the Swedish balloonist, is probably the
world’s top authority on this topic. He says free-flying high-altitude balloons
are impractical because of high winds; release a balloon on the equator and in
a few weeks it will end up at the North or South Pole. But solar-powered
balloons packed with a fuel cell and an onboard motor can remain stationary for
up to five years and are “perfectly feasible.” Lindstrand has been urging
companies to more aggressively pursue balloon-based wireless networks but says
that no one has stepped up yet. “Everybody keeps telling me, ‘Show me an
airship and I will buy it.’ No one wants to risk the money. The key is to find
somebody who is brave enough. I believe the stratospheric airship is a viable
project, but it needs to be created by a small elite team with past airship
experience and not by a conventional bloated aerospace contractor. If Google is
really on the scene, they would be the perfect sponsor.”
Stone is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in
San Francisco. Follow him on Twitter @BradStone.
Comments
Post a Comment