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Sparkle fiber optic cable 1011/9/2024 ![]() ![]() After years of anticipation, massive undersea fiber-optic cables, stretching thousands of miles, have begun arriving on African and European shores. Elon Musk’s SpaceX seems to have had better luck, having now launched over 1,700 small satellites as part of its Starlink constellation, although it won’t begin providing internet service in Africa to consumers until later in 2023.īut beneath these shiny objects in the sky - laid, in fact, on the ocean floor - are a series of more traditional and likely much more transformative efforts to bridge the connected and the unconnected. Meta - previously Facebook - has also floated airborne internet delivery systems, including using a satellite that would beam data to Africa from space (which was abandoned when the rocket carrying it was engulfed in flames on the launchpad) and its Aquila solar-powered drones (which were grounded after disappointing performances, including a crash landing). Alphabet is now at work on Project Taara, another “moonshot,” which aims to repurpose the Loon balloons’ airborne lasers. tech giants have had designs on building Africa’s internet. Schmidt is related to Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google.)įor more than a decade, U.S. ( Rest of World was founded by Sophie Schmidt. But by January 2021, after nearly a decade of work and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, the project’s lead announced that its “journey coming to an end.” Loon was dead, owing to the costs being too high to “build a long-term, sustainable business.” Instead of connecting the unconnected, Loon would join the artifacts at the ICT museum. Page dreamt of giant white balloons semi-autonomously navigating along atmospheric currents for thousands of miles, beaming connectivity down to remote areas or disaster zones. And I think Loon actually could change that,” he said. “There’s very many places you go in the world where you still don’t have a cell signal. In 2015, when asked which current project he was most excited about, then–Alphabet CEO Larry Page mentioned Loon. ![]() ![]() This jerry-built device was among the last remaining specimens of Loon, what had been Google’s “moonshot” project to connect rural Africa and other locations to the internet, using balloons floating in the stratosphere. Gray antennae protruded beneath, trussed like the legs of an oil rig. Inside the university’s ICT Museum, which showcases developments in communications technology, the men turned their attention to an object at the center of the room.Ībove a table crowded with old oscilloscopes, printers, and telephones, hung a lone box, white apart from two black solar panels fanning out from its top. Jacaranda petals, fallen off the trees but still vibrantly purple, littered the ground, and a troop of baboons rummaged through garbage cans for leftover food. The usually pristine grass of the campus was brown and dry. One sunny Thursday morning in September 2021, three men gathered at the Multimedia University of Kenya, in Nairobi, for a small ceremony. ![]()
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