Internet for everyone

Free Wi Fi and 3G for everyone? This is the ambitious, yet entirely feasible aim of the Sri Lankan Government. The Government has already set up a large number of free Wi-Fi hotspots. But this is not enough to cover the entire island. With almost everyone owning a smartphone, the Internet should not be the exotic destination it once was.

Sri Lanka has been at the forefront of mobile technology for decades. In 1989, it was the first South Asian country to introduce mobile phones. It was also the first to implement nationwide 3G and 4G networks, in 2004 and 2013, respectively. Sri Lanka was also one of the first countries in the region to introduce Internet, around 1993.

Now, Internet coverage in Sri Lankan cities is fairly robust, but it is lacking in the more rural areas of the country. There are an estimated 22 million cell phones in use (which actually exceeds the population), but only 2.8 million mobile internet connections and an additional 600,000 fixed line internet connections.

Project Loon

Now the Government has teamed up with Google to provide islandwide Internet coverage and Sri Lanka is among the few pioneering countries for this project. In 2011, Google began developing Project Loon, an experimental program to provide free internet access to people in remote rural areas, using high-altitude balloons floating in the stratosphere. After test runs in New Zealand, Brazil, and the US, Project Loon is finally ready to go live.

In 2016, Google will deploy balloons all over Sri Lanka, filling in its coverage gaps and effectively blanketing the entire island nation with broadband Internet. In fact, Sri Lanka will become the first country to formally launch this groundbreaking project. Google's agreement with Sri Lanka marks the first wide-scale application of the system, and vaults the small South Asian nation into the internet history books as a result. It is indeed great that Google has chosen Sri Lanka as the first country to get Project Loon.

Harsha de Silva, deputy minister of economic development said: "Hopefully in a few months every person and every device on the island will be covered by 3G.". Project Loon director Mike Cassidy travelled to Sri Lanka to finalize the agreement with Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

All 13 helium-filled balloons should be ready by March 2016. They will be placed in the stratosphere - roughly 19 kilometres up in the sky, scraping the edge of space. That's about twice as high as the altitude at which most commercial planes fly. Earthlings can then connect to the floating balloon network directly from their phones. Each balloon covers up to 40 km in diameter on the ground.

Operational costs

Unfortunately, the balloons cannot stay up there forever - Google plans to replace them every 100 days or so. To keep their operational costs down, local internet service providers will have access to them. Service providers will be able to access higher speeds and improve the quality of their existing service once the balloon project is up and running. We can also expect Internet access prices to come down.

For Google, getting remote populations online is good for business. The more people connected to the Internet, the more people likely to use the company's services, including Gmail, search and its YouTube video site. The race to bring rural regions online has captivated Silicon Valley, with other high-profile companies - from Facebook to SpaceX - gunning to spread connectivity using everything from satellites to drones, not to mention the "good old" submarine cables. Although relatively small, Sri Lanka has many remote areas where conventional wired telecom lines cannot reach and in hilly terrains, telecom tower coverage is usually blocked by mountain ranges.

Having a balloon solution high in the sky will enable easier line of sight Internet access for subscribers on the ground. There will be no blind spots with this system. However, it is not yet clear whether Google is footing the entire bill or whether the Government and/or telecom companies will share some costs. But there is no doubt that subscribers, including fishermen hunting for fish around the island, will benefit immensely. By next year, Google intends to form a continuous wide ring of Loon coverage that circles the Southern Hemisphere.

Solar power

One of the interesting technologies included in Project Loon is solar power. The balloons get their electricity from the sun, which is a great idea because they fly in the stratosphere above the clouds. Software moves the balloons up or down to catch wind currents based on their direction to more or less keep the balloons in one area. At that altitude, wind speeds can reach 160 Kmph, and the software has to cope with those speeds and changes in direction in real time. A third technology used in Project Loon is mesh networking, which sends Internet packets from balloon to balloon and zaps data to and from homes and businesses below that have specially built antennas on their roofs.

This is indeed not the first Google project in Sri Lanka. Google already has a service called Google Free Zone where Google teams up with telecom companies to subsidise data rates for people accessing Google services. Through this two-year-old initiative, the company makes deals with mobile carriers in specific countries and agrees to pay the data charges of people who use Google search, Gmail or Google+. Google Free Zone, as announced by Google on Nov. 8, 2012, operates in South Africa, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Nigeria and Kenya. The Google search homepage is offered in Sinhala and Tamil and Google Translate is also available for Sinhala and Tamil.

Street View

Earlier, Google's Street View cars mapped Sri Lanka, so we will soon have highly accurate door to door 3D navigation maps of the entire country.

This is indeed a big task - Sri Lanka has the 42nd biggest road network in the world with more than 114,000 Km of motorable roads. Coupled with broadband beamed from the sky, this will ensure that no part of Sri Lanka is really remote and cut off from the rest of the world.