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Vodacom on Wednesday announced that it formed a partnership with Alphabet, Google’s parent, to offer Internet access in rural Mozambique using Internet Loon balloons.
Loon will help Vodacom provide service to underserved and underserved parts of the southern African nation with a network of “mobile phone towers” operating 20 km above Earth.
“Using the Loon solution, Vodacom will expand access to the mobile network to the provinces of Cabo Delgado and Niassa, two regions that have been difficult to cover in the past due to extensive and logistically challenging geographic areas, along with low density of population, “Vodacom said in a sentence.
“The Loon solution will provide a 4G service that supports data, voice, SMS and USSD, which will also enable mobile financial services,” he added.
The service will be available to any Vodacom subscriber with a standard 4G-VoLTE enabled phone and a Sim card. Users will not need to do anything special to connect to the service; they will connect just as they would with a normal cell tower.
“In fact, a user is unlikely to know that they are connected to the service provided by a high-altitude balloon, except for the fact that they may have a signal in a place where it previously did not exist.”
Regulatory support
Loon and Vodacom have been working with Mozambique’s communications and aviation regulators, including the Autoridade Reguladora das Comunicações de Moçambique and the Mozambique Civil Aviation Institute, to obtain the necessary approvals to enable the service.
The service should be ready for commercial use in a few months. Loon CEO Alastair Westgarth said: “We see this as the first step towards a broader partnership that will allow us to serve more of those users across Africa.”
“The companies appreciate receiving approvals to begin importing and installing the ground infrastructure required for Loon’s balloons to operate in the stratosphere over the country, and for Loon’s service through the Vodacom network,” the companies said in the release.
Vodacom Mozambique chief technology officer Pedro Rabacal said the association with Loon’s offerings “will significantly accelerate Vodacom’s 4G coverage in areas of Mozambique that have been difficult to maintain.”
In the coming months, Loon and Vodacom will work together to continue installing ground infrastructure, which will serve as a physical connection point for Loon’s balloons to Vodacom’s core network and Internet.
Loon will also begin to fly balloons over Mozambique to learn the stratospheric wind patterns in which balloons must navigate to stay above the service area.
Loon’s globes can navigate the world by sailing with winds in the stratosphere. Once above a location in need of service, the balloons can be arranged in small groups to provide periods of extended connectivity below. The balloons are designed to fly for hundreds of days. When they are ready to go down, the balloons are sailed to a sparsely populated area and lowered for a controlled landing. Once on the ground, the balloon and components are collected by local recovery experts. – © 2020 NewsCentral Media
