The balloons act as floating cell towers and are equipped with two main radio transceivers: a broad-coverage LTE base station and a high-speed directional link used to connect between balloons and back down to the internet. Each balloon can provide coverage to a ground area some 80 km across, and serve thousands of subscribers. Project Loon, developed by X, Alphabet’s innovation lab X, provided connectivity to over 250,000 people in Puerto Rico after 2017’s hurricane.

 

Kenya has a population of more than 45 million. Although many of the country’s large urban areas are covered by operators, a great deal of rural Kenya is not covered.Telkom Kenya, the country’s third biggest operator after market leader Safaricom and Bharti Airtel Kenya, will work with Google Loon to deliver wireless Internet connectivity. The companies will be launching a commercial mobile service in 2019.  Telkom Kenya’s network service stations will connect to Loon's stratospheric balloons, which could be compared to wireless cell towers, via point-to-point wireless links. The balloons will transmit a signal over large areas to provide 4G/LTE service to remote areas.

 

“Kenya has one of the largest, most robust optical fibre network infrastructures in the Eastern African region”, explains Danson Njue, Research Analyst, Ovum, Middle East and Africa team. “Network deployment is undertaken both by the government and the private sector. The government-led National Optical Fibre Backbone Infrastructure (NOFBI), which is being undertaken in two phases, is at an advanced stage. Phase 1, started in 2007 and completed in 2009, provides 4300 km of fibre access across 58 major towns in the country. Phase 2 began in 2014 and aims to provide fibre connectivity across all 47 countries, as well as connect Kenya to South Sudan as part of the Eastern Africa regional transport, trade and development facilitation project. Major service providers are also involved in deploying metro networks across cities to support the provision of home and office broadband services.”

 

“The key driver for fibre deployment in Kenya and the region at large is the growing demand for fast broadband services. Currently, there are four sub-marine cables at the Kenyan coast, which includes SEACOM, TEAMS, EASSY and LION2 collectively providing total international bandwidth of 3.22Tbs at end-1Q18, compared to 2.91Tbs at end-1Q17. This represents a 10.9% year-on-year growth supported by the need to expand these cables’ capacity to meet growing bandwidth demand. Secondly, digital transformation is happening in Kenya and in the region, and fibre technology is a key enabler for digital services. The evolution of mobile technologies from 3G/3G+ to 4G/4G+ and later 5G requires high bandwidth, easily provided via optical fibre links. By deploying NOFBI projects, the government’s aim was to provide last mile connectivity across the 47 administrative units (county governments) to have an efficient transmission network with the central government, and also to promote access to e-government services across the country.”

 

“The main roadblock to increased fibre deployment is the lack of basic infrastructure across parts of the country, which makes deployment cost very high. Also, such mega fibre projects are capital intensive and lack of sufficient funding is a challenge across many African countries. Alternative connectivity technologies such Project Loon and broadband via TV White Spaces (TVWS) play a critical role in providing ubiquitous broadband access across the country, including the most remote locations where other technologies may prove difficult to deploy. As such, service providers can benefit by being able to provide modern services such as 3G and 4G in remote places in the country, which is what motivated the recent partnership between Loon and Telkom Kenya. Such remote places lack the basic infrastructure such as roads and energy, hence it may be very costly to use the available technologies to provide broadband access. However, the alternative technologies may not provide a permanent connectivity solution in these areas due to bandwidth constraints and lack of reliability. Therefore, as infrastructure improves, fixed broadband networks may be deployed to provide a long-lasting solution to connectivity challenges in the country.”

 

“To promote fibre development, there is a great opportunity for partnerships between governments, service providers, businesses, and digital content providers, among others. Governments need to create a favourable operating environment for service providers and businesses, as well as provide the necessary infrastructure especially in the remote areas to support fibre deployment. Service providers need to invest in fibre deployment as well as expand their service offering and increase service affordability. In addition, there is need to evolve business models to support scenarios where content providers partner with service providers to deploy fibre networks which they can later sell wholesale bandwidth to other service providers, including ISPs to resell to the end users.”

 

“Uganda and Ghana are good examples of how governments can promote fibre development. Technology companies Google and Facebook are involved in optical fibre projects in these countries, where they provide wholesale bandwidth to other service providers who lack the capacity to deploy their own fibre backhaul networks. Most governments in Africa are involved in deployment of national optical fibre infrastructure projects to provide last mile connectivity. Examples include Kenya, Uganda, Ghana and Tanzania.”