14 DAY TRIAL // The Sri Lanka government has just inked a deal with Google to have the Mountain View company test their Internet-carrying balloons inside their country's borders.
These balloons are part of Google's Project Loon, an initiative to bring Internet services to remote areas of the globe using helium-floated balloons.
According to AFP, Foreign and IT Minister Mangala Samaraweera announced the deal on Tuesday, an arrangement that covers the entire surface of his country.
Google previously had agreements with various governments like Australia, Argentina, Chile, and New Zeeland, but these deals allowed them only to test the balloons in remote areas of those countries.
The Project Loon deal is expected to drive Internet prices down in Sri Lanka
The Sri Lanka deal aims at providing affordable, high-speed Internet to the country's citizens, and to do this Google will also be granting access to local service providers with the goal of improving their services, cutting down costs and end-user prices.
Experts with insight in the technology sector are not surprised that Sri Lanka was the first country to actively let Google run a real-world, large-scale test of their product, since the country was also the first Asian state that introduced mobile phones, a 3G, and then a 4G network.
According to SiliconBeat, the “initiative would not have been possible without the support of” LotusFlare, a Silicon Valley startup run by Chamath Palihapitiya, who is born in Sri Lanka, raised in Canada, and is also the co-owner of the Golden State Warriors NBA team.
Facebook is also making headway with its Internet.org platform
The Google - Sri Lanka agreement comes only a day after Facebook announced it planned to let any telecom operator offer free Internet access to mobile phone users using their Internet.org platform, a project with similar goals to Project Loon.
Mobile operators are expected to flock the portal, Facebook's previous experiments in India showing how "more than half of the people who come online through Internet.org are [now] paying for data."
As Re/code points out, Internet.org is starting to become useful, not just as a moonshot project, allowing mobile operations to use it as a client acquisition tool, driving new customers to their services, while also providing free Internet to previously unreachable users.
