Project Loon has restored internet access to 100,000 people in Puerto Rico

By Eric Brackett Updated November 12, 2017

After receiving FCC approval to use its balloons to restore cellular and LTE service to the people of Puerto Rico, Alphabet wasted no time in deploying Project Loon. Last month, the company announced that it had successfully partnered with AT&T to restore service to part of the island.

“Working with AT&T, Project Loon is now supporting basic communication and internet activities like sending text messages and accessing information online for some people with LTE enabled phones,” Project Loon leader Alastair Westgarth wrote. “This is the first time we have used our new machine learning powered algorithms to keep balloons clustered over Puerto Rico, so we’re still learning how best to do this. As we get more familiar with the constantly shifting winds in this region, we hope to keep the balloons over areas where connectivity is needed for as long as possible.”

Recommended Videos

Now, Project Loon has reached new milestone. PCMag has reported that Project Loon has restored internet connectivity more than 100,000 people in Puerto Rico.

This report was confirmed on The Team at X’s Twitter account.

Since turning on service, #ProjectLoon has delivered basic internet connectivity to more than 100K people in Puerto Rico. https://t.co/s0zmFB9dRy

— The Team at X (@Theteamatx) November 9, 2017

Alphabet’s Loon balloons serve as replacements for the cell towers that were destroyed by Hurricane Maria, but they aren’t capable of providing any service on their own. Google’s parent company is still relying on AT&T and other cellular carriers to provide service; Loon just serves as a delivery mechanism.

Westgarth warned that Project Loon was still an experimental technology, so the company could make no promises regarding how long Loon would work. However, he said that they intended to maintain the project “in areas where it’s needed for as long as it is useful and we’re able to do so.”

Unfortunately, it is looking like Project Loon might be needed for many months to come. NPR reports that nearly 80 percent of Puerto Rico remains without power, and lack of reliable communication services further slowed the recovery. Google’s parent company is hopeful that Project Loon will be able to aid relief efforts while ensuring that those caught in the storm are able to keep in touch with friends and family.

This isn’t the first time that Project Loon has been used to respond to disasters. Earlier this year, the company worked with the Peruvian government and wireless providers to restore internet access to the tens of thousands of people who were affected by floods.

X was formerly known as Google X; the so-called Moonshot Factory was where Google kicked off its most pie in the sky concepts. Today X is an innovation lab within Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

Update: Project Loon has reached 100,000 users in Puerto Rico.

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Computing

Google Gemini’s best AI tricks finally land on Microsoft Copilot

Copilot app for Mac

Microsoft’s Copilot had a rather splashy AI upgrade fest at the company’s recent event. Microsoft made a total of nine product announcements, which include the agentic trick called Actions, Memory, Vision, Pages, Shopping, and Copilot Search.

A healthy few have already appeared on rival AI products such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, alongside much smaller players like Perplexity and browser-maker Opera. However, two products that have found some vocal fan-following with Gemini and ChatGPT have finally landed on the Copilot platform.

Cars

Rivian set to unlock unmapped roads for Gen2 vehicles

rivian unmapped roads gen2 r1t gallery image 0

Rivian fans rejoice! Just a few weeks ago, Rivian rolled out automated, hands-off driving for its second-gen R1 vehicles with a game-changing software update. Yet, the new feature, which is only operational on mapped highways, had left many fans craving for more.
Now the company, which prides itself on listening to - and delivering on - what its customers want, didn’t wait long to signal a ‘map-free’ upgrade will be available later this year.
“One feedback we’ve heard loud and clear is that customers love [Highway Assist] but they want to use it in more places,” James Philbin, Rivian VP of autonomy, said on the podcast RivianTrackr Hangouts. “So that’s something kind of exciting we’re working on, we’re calling it internally ‘Map Free’, that we’re targeting for later this year.”
The lag between the release of Highway Assist (HWA) and Map Free automated driving gives time for the fleet of Rivian vehicles to gather ‘unique events’. These events are used to train Rivian’s offline model in the cloud before data is distilled back to individual vehicles.
As Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe explained in early March, HWA marked the very beginning of an expanding automated-driving feature set, “going from highways to surface roads, to turn-by-turn.”
For now, HWA still requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road. The system will send alerts if you drift too long without paying attention. But stay tuned—eyes-off driving is set for 2026.
It’s also part of what Rivian calls its “Giving you your time back” philosophy, the first of three pillars supporting Rivian’s vision over the next three to five years. Philbin says that philosophy is focused on “meeting drivers where they are”, as opposed to chasing full automation in the way other automakers, such as Tesla’s robotaxi, might be doing.
“We recognize a lot of people buy Rivians to go on these adventures, to have these amazing trips. They want to drive, and we want to let them drive,” Philbin says. “But there’s a lot of other driving that’s very monotonous, very boring, like on the highway. There, giving you your time back is how we can give the best experience.”
This will also eventually lead to the third pillar of Rivian’s vision, which is delivering Level 4, or high-automation vehicles: Those will offer features such as auto park or auto valet, where you can get out of your Rivian at the office, or at the airport, and it goes off and parks itself.
While not promising anything, Philbin says he believes the current Gen 2 hardware and platforms should be able to support these upcoming features.
The second pillar for Rivian is its focus on active safety features, as the EV-maker rewrote its entire autonomous vehicle (AV) system for its Gen2 models. This focus allowed Rivian’s R1T to be the only large truck in North America to get a Top Safety Pick+ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
“I believe there’s a lot of innovation in the active safety space, in terms of making those features more capable and preventing more accidents,” Philbin says. “Really the goal, the north star goal, would be to have Rivian be one of the safest vehicles on the road, not only for the occupants but also for other road users.”

Cars

Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan hit the brake on shipments to U.S. over tariffs

Range Rover Sport P400e

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced it will pause shipments of its UK-made cars to the United States this month, while it figures out how to respond to President Donald Trump's 25% tariff on imported cars.

"As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are taking some short-term actions, including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans," JLR said in a statement sent to various media.