Why Google's Project Loon can't help fix the internet in Puerto Rico

Hurricane Maria demolished Puerto Rico’s brittle electrical grid in one slash across the island. In doing so, it also took the broadband infrastructure with it. A fix could soon be high-altitude concepts for beaming internet to disaster-stricken areas from the sky, but innovations like that (such as Google’s Project Loon) are still in their R&D phase, and not yet ready to be deployed.

For the uninitiated, Project Loon involves balloons that sail through brisk winds at some 65,000 feet of altitude. Dangling from these balloons are receivers that are capable of streaming internet to and from phones on the ground below. Read more...