Facebook Plans To Use Drones To Get the Unconnected Online

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that
the social media giant intends to connect the two-thirds of the
world currently offline to the Internet by using solar powered
drones, satellites, and lasers. In the announcement, published on
his
Facebook wall, Zuckerberg said that Facebook would be working
with Internet.org to launch the drones:

Today, we’re sharing some details of the work Facebook’s
Connectivity Lab is doing to build drones, satellites and lasers to
deliver the internet to everyone.

Our goal with Internet.org is to make affordable access to basic
internet services available to every person in the world.

We’ve made good progress so far. Over the past year, our work in
the Philippines and Paraguay alone has doubled the number of people
using mobile data with the operators we’ve partnered with, helping
3 million new people access the internet.

We’re going to continue building these partnerships, but
connecting the whole world will require inventing new technology
too. That’s what our Connectivity Lab focuses on, and there’s a lot
more exciting work to do here.

In the promotional video from Internet.org (below), Facebook’s
Yael Maguire outlines how solar powered drones, satellites, and
lasers could be used to bring the Internet to more of the world’s
population.

Google has a similar project, “Project Loon,” which aims to get
more people online by using 20-kilometer high balloons. Thirty of these
balloons were launched in New Zealand last summer. In the video for
Facebook’s project, Maguire explains that the solar powered drones
Facebook is working on would also be operating roughly 20
kilometers above the Earth’s surface. Watch the video from Project
Loon below:

Predictably, governments could hamper Facebook’s and Google’s
attempts to get more people online, as Mark Little, an analyst at
the consultancy firm Ovum, told the BBC:

“It is going to have a lot of political hoops to jump through.
Some governments won’t put up with having that fleet over their
airspace.”

Mr Little thinks that for both Facebook and Google, the
technology in their projects may prove to be “the easy bit” and
that the real challenge will lie in persuading governments around
the world that its alternative networks are viable.

“Mobile operators are always under threat from alternative ways
of delivering net services. This becomes a concern for governments
when a nation’s communications rest on an outside provider,” he
said.

More from Reason on drones here.