Summary: The government is developing its own "Internet Balloons infrastructure" and will prioritize national companies for partnerships
By Angelica Mari, Brazil Tech
The Brazilian government is planning to start a project
using balloons to take internet access to remote areas of the country — and
that has nothing to do with the Google Loon project.
Google representatives have met Brazilian government
officials last week to talk about potential partnerships, but the initiative
led by the public telecoms company Telebrás and the National Institute for
Space Research (INPE) has been signed off by the federal government back in May
and the first tests are scheduled to begin next month.
The government has preferred off-the-shelf equipment for the
trials and a prototype made by Altave, a startup from the São Paulo countryside
city of São José dos Campos has been chosen for the upcoming trials. The idea
is to customize existing options and test their performance to enable the
development of a final version of the internet baloon.
Telebrás president Caio Bonilha told Brazilian newspaper O
Estado de São Paulo that the government will prefer to work with national
suppliers and import as little electronic equipment as possible — but added
that the competitive process for the project will be open to local and foreign
parties to ensure that the best option is chosen.
Connecting rural areas with the balloons is a model the
government is very keen to develop. Senior representatives of the Ministry of
Communications have been quoted as saying that the cost of that option is much
lower than that of a transmission tower, with the added bonuses of ease of
deployment and greater reach.
Next month's tests will be carried out at an INPE base in
the São Paulo countryside, with the Altave balloon attached to the ground and
also attached to a moving vehicle, which will then send the internet signal to
the local city hall and a school.
The following steps after the test phase will be to define
the companies that will take part in the project, develop a more advanced
prototype next year and create a final product in 2015.