Project Loon has signed an agreement to provide internet coverage in Sri Lanka, marking the first formal agreement between the Google initiative and a national government.
Sri Lankan Foreign Minister, Mangala Samaraweera spoke optimistically about the agreement with the satellite initiative, saying ““In a few months we will try [to] be able to say: Sri Lanka covered.”
Despite this, the agreement has not specified a timetable for commencing the project. A Financial Times source described a 2015 deployment as “highly unlikely”, adding that “this is more of an agreement to have further discussions about how we set it up. Any launch is going to be quite a long way off — a year or two at least.”
Google has previously stated that it is aiming to launch Project Loon commercially in 2016. The project was initially trialled in New Zealand, and has signed trial agreements with Telefonica, Telstra and Vodafone.
