Facebook to use drones to bring Internet everywhere

Facebook is working on solar-powered drones to deliver and improve internet access around the world. The social network unveiled its new Connectivity Lab, which includes experts from Nasa, and was described as a team working on “new aerospace and communications technologies” with the overall aim of expanding global internet access.

According to Washington post, Facebook's sci-fi take on connecting the rest of the world to broadband may sound magical. But it's all dependent on real-world, physical constraints. And now, Mark Zuckerberg has revealed more — a lot more — about how this system is going to work.

As he hinted earlier in the week, the drones we've heard so much about are just one piece of Zuckerberg's vision. Here's what we now know, thanks to the Facebook exec's white paper, released Friday. Zuckerberg has settled on 65,000 feet as the optimal altitude for the drones — at that height, they'll be beyond the range of U.S. commercial airspace (though getting the drones up there will still likely involve a detailed regulatory dance).

Weather and wind are also a little calmer at that layer of the atmosphere, reducing the burden associated with designing the crafts. It'll still take a careful balance of priorities, though. The drone has to be large enough to fit the right amount of solar panels, so that it can gather enough power to operate on batteries at night. It has to be small enough so it doesn't need a ton of energy to remain in the air for months or years. It has to be cheap, so you can build a lot of them. And it has to be controllable — "unlike balloons," wrote Zuckerberg, in a jab at Google.

Zuckerberg also announced the industry in Britain was now part of the project.

“Today we are also bringing on key members of the team from Ascenta, a small UK-based company whose founders created early versions of Zephyr, which became the world’s longest flying solar-powered unmanned aircraft. They will join our team working on connectivity aircraft.”

The new project is an extension of the Internet.org group which Facebook helped found in 2013 along with other major technology companies like Samsung and Nokia, with the final goal of bringing the Internet to the parts of the world without access.

The drones, flying at 60,000ft, will be capable of staying in the air for months at a time. They are relatively cheap will be best for suburban areas that do not have the cables or infrastructure to carry internet or telephone signals. The drones are effectively mobile phone masts in the sky and bounce smartphone communications between satellites and base stations on Earth. Low-orbit and geosynchronous satellites, which have orbits that match the Earth’s rotation and are effectively stationary, will cover more remote areas in Africa and Asia. The internet access would be transmitted in the form of free-space optical communication, or FSO, which transmits data using infrared laser beams.

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