Google's aerial ambitions continue unabated. Need proof? Just talk to Sundar Pichai -- just before he sat down for a Q&A with Bloomberg's Brad Stone at MWC, the Google SVP confirmed the company's internet-beaming Titan drones would take their flight in the coming months, and that its Project Loon balloons now stay afloat for "six months at a time. The last time Google decided to speak publicly about its fleet of internet-beaming Project Loon balloons, they could languidly hang in the atmosphere for about 100 days. That's not a bad stretch considering these things can now deliver LTE data speeds to devices on the ground, but Google's got these things running even better than before.
Work on Project Titan is progressing a little more slowly, which is hardly a shock considering the complexity involved with maintaining and flying internet-friendly drones en masse. To hear Pichai tell the tale, those drones are about as far along as Project Loon was a few years ago.
It's little wonder both of these projects got brief updates at the same time -- after all, they're designed to work well in tandem. See, thanks to some clever, algorithmic orientation smarts (and the eventually deployment of a whole fleet of balloons), Google's Project Loon is meant to internet connections to locations on the surface below it. Meanwhile, the Titan drones (which were very nearly snapped up by social giant Facebook) are obviously mobile and can beam internet connectivity down at areas that really need it, like disaster zones. Between them, Google's quest to bring way to bring the web to the people and places that can't easily get it now seems less like something out of a pulp sci-fi novel and more like
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