It started as a weather balloon and a bunch of cobbled together spare parts to provide Wi-Fi to a rural sheep farmer in New Zealand.

Now Google’s Loon enterprise is beaming the internet to the Carolinas from 60,000 feet up:

“No, that bevy of balloons dotting flight-tracking maps 60,000 feet above the Carolinas is actually ‘beaming the internet,’ according to The New York Times.

“The balloons — chartered by Google-backed Loon — provide Wi-Fi to rural areas where internet connection is often spotty, if not nonexistent. A fleet of the balloons were released over Kenya on Tuesday, The Times reported. At least four additional balloons were also spotted bobbing from Virginia down through the Carolinas and into Georgia and Alabama.”

Further Reading

Strange orbs floating over Southeast aren't UFOs. Here's how they help deliver internetThe Wi-Fi balloons belong to a Google subsidiary and were spotted Tuesday over North and South Carolina.amp.newsobserver.com

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A fleet of the balloons were released over Kenya on Tuesday, The Times reported.

Here's a closer look at the balloon-delivered coverage in Kenya.

Alphabet's Loon balloons provide their first commercial internet service in KenyaVia a partnership with Telkom Kenya.www.theverge.com

That sounds good in these pandemic times and if they have another semester of on-line school at home.

Whether you love Google or not (and I know a lot of people don't) they do have a lot of engineers working on a lot of very cool projects, most of which will never see any real world application at all.

This is great though, combines simple ideas with high tech and is useful in all sorts of circumstances... disaster relief springs immediately to mind.