Project loon team gave Puerto Rico connectivity and assembled a helicopter

Zeddicuz

[br] [br][br][br]"So this happened-this is September 2017," Juan Ramírez Lugo, president of the AAAS Caribbean division, tells the audience at the 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Conference.[br][br]The slide that soon greets the room depicts an almost surreal reality: the available power (or lack thereof) on the island of Puerto Rico in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Maria.[br][br]That’s precisely when Project Loon stepped in. Project Loon is the high-profile balloon Internet experiment from Alphabet's X (formerly Google X); on October 20, project lead Alastair Westgarth wrote a blog post revealing that it was working with AT&T and T-Mobile to support basic communications on the island, including text messaging and Internet access through LTE-compatible phones. This marks the first time Project Loon pointed its machine-learning algorithms toward keeping balloons over Puerto Rico—the island previously only hosted launch sites—and the first time its leaders recognized that their goal of connecting underserved areas may mesh perfectly with disaster response.  [br]"We usually think about [Project Loon] in places with no existent network, but when a network goes out, people who were served become underserved," says Sal Candido, a director and principal engineer at X, who presented with Ramírez Lugo at this weekend's conference. "In the future, being prepared for these kind of things is something we hadn't really thought of, but it could be done in advance as a contingency."[br][br]Candido notes that the pace of partnerships made Project Loon's Puerto Rico deployment so successful—the initiative delivered Internet to 100,000 Puerto Ricans by early November, and Candido says the number exceeds 200,000 now. Typical deployments require Project Loon to work out ground network hardware with local governments, recruit existing carriers in the area for service, and then acquire the rights to use the spectrum.