Puerto Rico Looks to Alphabet's X Project Loon Balloons to Restore Cell Service
With much of the U.S. commonwealth’s cellular service and electrical grid down since Hurricane Maria, the parent company of tech giant Google could help restore wireless communication to 3.4 million residents
- Larry Greenemeier for Scientific American October 13th, 2017
- Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/puerto-rico-looks-to-alphabets-x-project-loon-balloons-to-restore-cell-service/
More than three weeks after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, much of the island remains without access to cell phone service and electricity. …“a few 900-MHz links aren’t going to be enough to provide high-speed connectivity to a whole island,” says Aditya Dhananjay, a postdoc at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. However, “it’s more than enough spectrum to connect Puerto Rico to the rest of the world for voice calls and text messaging, but you won’t be able to stream YouTube videos,” adds Dhananjay, who is not involved with Project Loon.
