Facebook's drone-based Internet delivery project is back in the news with the site's founder Mark Zuckerberg expanding upon his plan to bring the web to billions of people in underdeveloped countries.
Zuckerberg's news today was the introduction of the Connectivity Lab. The lab is an internal Facebook group tasked with working with the already established Internet.org group to find the best way to spread affordable Internet connectivity to those currently offline and thus establish a truly World Wide Web.
And, at the same time, greatly increase his company's potential customer base.
The drone aspect of the plan has been discussed before, but Zuckerberg wanted to spell out some of the other aspects of the plan.
"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," he said
Some of these new technologies are truly out of this world. According to a post on Internet.org, the group is taking a layered approach in how it would like to deliver the web to the world.
"The team's approach is based on the principle that different sized communities need different solutions and they are already working on new delivery platforms-including planes and satellites-to provide connectivity for communities with different population densities," it said.
The solar-powered drones would be used for suburban areas. These can be launched quickly and remain airborne for months at a time to bring targeted Internet access to a specific geographic area.
For places where the population is more spread out, Internet.org would like to use low-Earth orbit satellites. In both cases the data would be beamed to the ground. using Free-space optical communication, essentially infrared laser beams. This technology has not yet been put into the field.
"FSO is a promising technology that potentially allows us to dramatically boost the speed of internet connections provided by satellites and drones," Internet.org wrote.
The connectivity team has expanded its solar-powered drone search to now include a company called Ascenta. Zuckerberg said the UK-based Ascenta has already created the world's longest flying solar-powered aircraft called the Zehpyr will join Facebook's team to develop connectivity aircraft. Other reports have Facebooks in talks with Titan Aerospace, which has several solar-powered craft in its inventory.
The other aspect of the plan that Zuckerberg did not mention was whether this is all being done out of the goodness of his heart or to expand Facebook's reach. Google is attempting something similar with its Project Loon, which uses high-flying balloons instead of satellites and fixed winged aircraft.
"Zuckerberg is pushing this as an altruistic way of connecting more people in the world - the net as a basic human right - but by increasing the total of net connections it also increases Facebook's members and the amount of sharing done, which in turn creates more space for advertising and drives its revenues in a massive way," said Ovum analyst Mark Little.
