The team behind Alphabet 's Project Oz , which uses high - altitude balloons to provide internet connectivity to remote areas of the planet , has stumbled on a way to reduce their deployment costs by 90 % . While Project Loon’s engineers and machine learning algorithms slowly got better, they recently stumbled upon an irregularity which has a dramatic impact on the project. During testing , the scientists discovered some balloons remained in one place , sometimes for months , allowing the team to develop an algorithm to deploy the balloons in teams . The breakthrough could make Project Oz commercially viable , though the team says there is still much testing to be done .
The team behind Alphabet 's Project Oz , which uses high - altitude balloons to provide internet connectivity to remote areas of the planet , has stumbled on a way to reduce their deployment costs by 90 % . During testing , the scientists discovered some balloons remained in one place , sometimes for months , allowing the team to develop an algorithm to deploy the balloons in teams . The breakthrough could make Project Oz commercially viable , though the team says there is still much testing to be done .