AALTO aims to democratize high-speed internet access with solar-powered drones

Image credits: Airbus/Aalto

In early 2021, Alphabet shut down Loon. It was a familiar story in Google X’s history. It was a wildly upwardly ambitious moonshot that took off almost a decade later before gaining any meaningful traction.

“Despite Loon’s extraordinary technological advances, Loon’s journey came to an end in 2021 as the road to commercialization proved much longer and riskier than expected.” On the page, he explains it with a touch of sadness.

The project used weather balloons to bring high-speed internet to areas with poor infrastructure, such as sub-Saharan Africa. Loon has attracted considerable interest and consideration for use in the wake of natural disasters such as the hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico in 2017.

Some of Loon’s foundational technology lives on in other Alphabet projects. Meanwhile, that spirit is maintained by Airbus through AALTO. But while Loon relied on balloons, for his new project he’s using Zephyr’s solar-powered drones.

“[Loon] We’ve had very good customer engagement,” AALTO CEO Samer Halawi told TechCrunch in a sit-down interview at Mobile World Congress last week. “They got people to sign up for the service right away. But what happened was the balloons were moving around. What they did to overcome this was they used multiple balloons and “We ended up having to use eight times as many balloons to cover the same area.”

Aalto relies on fixed-wing drones, whose movements are at least more predictable than weather balloons. In 2022, Airbus acquired fixed-wing drone technology from QinetiQ, a spin-off company of the UK Department of Defense and Space.

The Zephyr takes off from a circular runway and ascends in an ever-expanding spiral. Drones reach the stratosphere at altitudes of over 60,000 feet. This keeps it above commercial aircraft and weather events that may interfere with solar radiation coverage. After all, airspace is also not regulated to nearly the same extent as the airspace below it.

According to AALTO figures, each drone can cover up to 7,500 square kilometers of ground, which is equivalent to up to 250 cell phone towers. Once in flight, the system can operate for months on solar power alone. Batteries still have a limited shelf life, so the system lands for battery replacement approximately every six months.

AALTO’s go-to-market includes transactions with carriers as well as government agencies. Like his previous Loon, the company is also looking at temporary deployments to cell towers that go down after natural disasters.