A Google-affiliated company has chosen Kenya as the home of its first announced commercial deal for delivering Internet access to hard-to-reach areas using high-altitude  balloons.

Loon, which is linked to Google through parent company Alphabet Inc, says it will work with Telkom Kenya to deliver 4G/LTE cellular access to Kenya in 2019.

From The Star.

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.

Billions of people on Earth still aren’t connected to the internet. They tend to live in the poorest places with the least infrastructure to support it.

Since Google first launched the project in 2013, its goal has been to connect everyone on the planet. While getting more people connected fits with Google’s ambitions of making information “universally accessible and useful”, it also increases the number of people who can use Google’s ad-supported services.

Read more at The Star.