Sri Lanka is looking to take advantage of Google’s initiative to outfit the world with Internet access. The remote Asian country of about 20 million people has signed a deal with Google to take part in Project Loon.
Officials said Google’s Project Loon will outfit the country with high-altitude “floating telecom tower” balloons designed to cover the country with broadband Internet access.
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“Sri Lanka is on its way to becoming the very first country in the world to have network connectivity cover the entire country,” Sri Lanka’s Telecom Minister Mangala Samaraweera said.
Sri Lanka’s Deputy Investment Promotions Minister Eran Wickremeratne said he expects it will take just over a dozen Internet balloons covering around 5,000 square kilometers each to outfit the whole country with broadband Internet. The balloons will be equipped with LTE standard transceivers to fill gaps in coverage.
“Service providers will enter into agreements with ‘floating cell towers’ that will be shared, bringing down transmission costs leading to further reductions in cost-of-service provision,” Deputy Economic Policy Minister Harsha de Silva said.
Project Loon efforts first began in June of 2013 when Google launched several balloons to heights of about 65,000 feet above Earth’s surface. The project utilized 2.4 GHz radio links within an unlicensed section of the spectrum band.
Google describes Project Loon as “a network of balloons traveling on the edge of space, designed to connect people in rural and remote areas, help fill coverage gaps and bring people back online after disasters.”
