Loon, the balloon-powered internet provider from Alphabet, is taking its technology into orbit. The technology will help run Telesat's upcoming satellite-based broadband service, which is slated to launch in 2022.
If all goes well, the low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites will offer low-latency Gigabit internet to customers anywhere in the world.
"With billions of people still lacking internet access, there's an urgent need for multiple approaches to solving this problem," Loon CEO Alastair Westgarth said in a Thursday announcement.
The partnership will specifically tap Loon's software-defined networking platform to manage how the wireless data packets flow between the satellites and to the ground stations below.
Loon's technology has already been used to deliver high-speed 4G internet access from the company's hot air balloons, which can float at a height of 20 kilometers (65,000 feet) to deliver broadband in remote parts of the world. Later this year, Loon's balloon-powered internet will commercially roll out for the first time in Kenya, with the goal of bringing broadband to the country's mountainous regions.
Now Loon is partnering with Telesat, a Canadian satellite communications company, to use the same networking technology in LEO, or about 1,000 kilometers from the planet's surface. It's a logical fit, according to Loon's head of engineering Salvatore Candido.
"The synergy between balloons and non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) satellites comes from a shared characteristic—both are in constant motion relative to the Earth and one another," he wrote in a blog post.
Loon's networking technology was designed to run an internet service in tandem with this constant motion by predicting the future state of the network. Everything from the position of the balloons, the ground stations and the weather can be forecasted to calculate how Loon should go about routing the internet connections to consumers below.
Loon's technology promises to help Telesat's system overcome similar challenges with its own broadband network, which will work via hundreds of satellites. The result should optimize the network speeds, minimize latency, and avoid disruptions, Candido said.
Telesat says the partnership will give it a "powerful competitive advantage" over rival upcoming satellite-powered internet services slated to arrive in the coming years, like Elon Musk's SpaceX.
Although satellite-based broadband is nothing new, both Telesat and SpaceX want to upgrade the technology with the use of low-Earth orbit satellites that can offer faster connection speeds and minimize the latency down to 35 milliseconds.
On the same day, Telesat announced an agreement to use Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin aerospace company to help launch the satellite-powered internet service. The partnership promises to reduce the costs of running the next-generation broadband service by tapping Blue Origin's reusable rockets, Telesat said.