Google's Internet-beaming balloons to take off

Google's Internet-beaming balloons are ready to take off on the next phase of their mission to deliver online access in regions where most people live offline.

The balloons will begin hovering in the stratosphere above Indonesia in an expansion of the project announced on Wednesday. About 250 million people live in the country, which is composed of about 17,000 islands in that part of Southeast Asia, but only 42 million have Internet access, according to the CIA's estimates.

Google's 2-year-old "Project Loon" program aims to change that by transmitting high-speed Internet signals from clusters of balloons floating about 18,000 meters above the Earth.