Project Loon celebrates commercial deal in Kenya

Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., has announced the first commercial deal of project Loon, celebrated with Telkom Kenya. High-altitude balloons will provide 4G/LTE cellular access to the country in 2019. The balloons will be tested in central Kenya, which has been difficult to service due to mountainous or inaccessible terrain. The high-altitude balloons have already been deployed in emergencies in Peru and Puerto Rico, where they helped regions devastated by floods and hurricanes. The announcement comes just a week after Loon graduated from Alphabet’s “moonshot factory” known as X. This means that Loon is considered a full-fledged company beside sibling companies including Google and self-driving car developer Waymo.