With Project Loon, Google is engineering a mobile network in reverse

Building a balloon-based broadband network is nothing like designing a satellite constellation, Google explains. You can think of Loon as a cellular network where the towers are moving instead of the subscribers. My bet is Google won’t get too complex in its designs for reasons of both maintenance and cost. These balloons will be floating in the stratosphere where they won’t be very easy to fix if they malfunction, and if Loon really does take off, Google will launch tens — if not hundreds — of thousands of them into the heavens. At that kind of scale, cheap hardy equipment will be a big priority.