[deanCommie]

>...the road to commercial viability has proven much longer and riskier than hoped. So we’ve made the difficult decision to close down Loon.

I don't really understand - wasn't the whole premise of Google X and their "Other Bets" that "Google has deep pockets. Let's use this to explore radically big ideas, that are ahead of their time, and let the world catch up to them?"

Bringing "abundant, affordable Internet access, not just to the next billion, but to the last billion" is clearly an investment. You bring them the internet. You spur them to achieve great things. Then you reap the financial rewards.

But that's not a 10-year plan, that's a 20-50-100 year plan. But, there's no reason to think that Google couldn't think like a 20-50-100 year company if they tried.

So what happened? Did they really think that they were going to make money from the poorest 1B people on the planet BEFORE they brought them ubiquitous internet and helped them use that internet to improve their quality of life?

[ncallaway]

Worth remembering that Starlink is coming online relatively soon, and that Google put nearly $1B into SpaceX 5 years ago.

It looks to me like Google made a couple of bets over the last 10 years on different paths to getting worldwide internet access.

One path is looking more promising than the other, so they're culling now.

[sdenton4]

Well, look what happened in India: Jio sank $N billion dollars on building out 4G everywhere, and a billion or so people got much better internet access. The answer is clear: we can get there by laying more of the kind of infrastructure we already have in the developed world, and it's just a matter of getting the will to put it in place.

[perryizgr8]

I was curious how much Jio spent on creating their network and the answer seems to be approximately ₹1T or $14B.

[black3r]

Which is approximately their parent company's yearly operating income. And then they sold 33% of Jio for $21B. (e.g. Google owns 7.7% of Jio for $4.7B).

I'd say it was a really good investment for them.

[selimthegrim]

Surprised they're not demanding the government refund them for their idle equipment in Jammu-Kashmir

[ikiris]

Well... Starlink showed its a 6 year plan.

[MattGaiser]

I suspect that Starlink will render it unneeded.

[systemBuilder]

You mean starlink's failure will supplant loon's? Think carefully before you respond. I am one of about 5 engineers to help invent both globalstar and iridium.

[ncallaway]

> Think carefully before you respond. I am one of about 5 engineers to help invent both globalstar and iridium.

I don't think this kind of warning is a helpful part of the conversation.

If you want to make an argument against Starlink, fine, go ahead and make it. But what is the use of the admonition for someone to "think carefully before they respond"?

It seems to be the only real effect that is intended to have is to deter additional conversation.

Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and ignore your warning, and the credentials you present: I think Starlink is going to be a commercial success. If they solve the satellite interlink problem (which, admittedly, is a big problem), I think it will be a viable path to delivering a global internet solution.

[systemBuilder]

First of all, my comment was in response to a flippant comment "Oh Starlinks gonna win." In that context its more information than the original commenter gave along with their 1-bit opinion.

Oh yeah and I also interviewed with Loon.

Iridium solved the satellite interlink problem (but only wirelessly at 10 Mbps). They could have used laser crosslinks but they didn't know how to implement a search / sync up algorithm (fast sub-second search algorithms were available before iridium was built but they failed to take advantage of the MIT research.)

The basic problem is that Iridium / Globalstar / Loon / Starlink are all fill-in systems for terrestrial internet. And since we've been deploying terrestrial internet for 25Y, the number of places missing higher-speed internet is smaller and smaller each year. All the rich customers have all been reached by faster, cheaper wires. The poor customers ... well they are poor, they will not pay much for service. And there are fewer of them every year ...

No LEO system can actually penetrate a building with a data signal. It's a physics problem with sending a signal 400 mi wirelessly. Reusable rockets don't solve that physics / power problem. Iridium has a special +35dbm channel that can ring a phone inside a building, but you have to walk outside (in the rain, snow, whatever) to take the call. Same with starlink. Physics hasn't changed since the mid 1990s. It is not expected to change in the next billion years, either.

So its just not a smart thing to build satellite internet. period.

[kortilla]

People with that type of vision get suffocated out by the bureaucracy of big companies. That Google doesn’t exist anymore.

[creeble]

I believe gravity is what happened, in the particular case of Loon.

I never understood it. It is expensive to keep things fighting gravity. The only way to avoid that is to either a) not put them up above the earth, or b) put them high enough that gravity isn't much of a force, like low earth orbit.

It doesn't take a genius to understand that, but it took Elon Musk to prove it.

Meanwhile... Google launched balloons.

See also: FB project Aquila.

[tobinfricke]

Gravity in low earth orbit is pretty much the same as it is at the surface.

[creeble]

I should have said gravity combined with low speed.

Or, I suppose more simply, "weather".