Alphabet has announced that its Loon project, which uses floating balloons to provide internet, has provided its first commercial service in Kenya.

This news was announced in a blog post announcing by Loon’s CEO Alastair Westgarth who said that the 4G LTE service will be provided to Telkom Kenya subscribers via a fleet of around 35 balloons, covering an area of around 50,000 square kilometers across western and central areas of the country, including including the areas of Iten, Eldoret, Baringo, Nakuru, Kakamega, Kisumu, Kisii, Bomet, Kericho, and Narok.

According to the Westgarth, “Early service quality testing has shown very positive results. In one late-June field testing session within the service region, we saw an uplink speed of 4.74Mpbs, a downlink speed of 18.9Mbps, and a latency of 19 milliseconds (ms).

“In that and subsequent tests, the Loon and Telkom teams have used the service for all sorts of applications, including voice calls, video calls, YouTube, WhatsApp, email, texting, web browsing, and more.”

The company’s balloons (or “flight vehicles” as it calls them) hover at a height of roughly 20 km, analyzing the weather to ride around on stratospheric winds. Individual balloons can alternate between providing internet connectivity directly and acting as a link in the mesh network.

The balloons can stay in the air for over 100 days before coming back down to earth.

Westgarth adds that the aim of “Loon is not to replace the ground and space-based technologies that exist today.” But “To provide a third layer to Earth’s connectivity ecosystem in the stratosphere. From here, we can leverage the strengths of both existing layers — the lower latency of a connection from the ground and the expanded coverage area of a connection from space — to connect more people, places, and things worldwide.”

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