1960s?
Try 1783 - http://www.space.com/16595-montgolfiers-first-balloon-flight.html
France's space agency, the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), will team with Google to advance the Project Loon broadband balloons project. As CNES points out, France has been messing around with balloons since the 1960s. Today the CNES has 60 staff working with balloons, the world's second-largest such program after …
There's no particular goal here: . . . But both organisations agree that balloons have the potential to deliver internet access to remote and otherwise hard-to-service areas, for the betterment of all.
I'm all for research to see where it goes, but the idea of covering hard-to service areas with this technology seems to have a flaw at this point in time. Hard to service areas generally have, by definition, few users. One high paying user could fund the use of this in special cases, but the idea of delivering internet "for the betterment of all" doesn't sound commercially workable since these balloons will likely be expensive. In any case, over time it may be that the cost will be lower, and the (presumably) lower latency than satellite will make it competitive for coverage of very large remote areas.
@strum
Re: All?
>> Hard to service areas generally have, by definition, few users.
Largely because they have no service to use?<
That was my thought also. Hard to service areas may have few users, but may have lots and lots of potential users. Just because an area is hard to service doesn't mean no one lives there.
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Yes. It will also survey the government contrail chemical dispersion to ensure nobody gets missed, heat your brain with microwaves to induce paranoia, then make you hear voices using coinciding ultrasonics (something the satellites have trouble doing as they're not in the atmosphere), and give your dog irritable bowel syndrome to disrupt your sleep.
I recommend shooting randomly into the sky because they're actually completely transparent. The ones you can see are just decoys and if captured will only be doing what Google say they'll be doing. It's all very clever.