Facebook made a solar-powered plane to deliver internet
From engadget:
Imagine this, out of approximately 4 billion people who are not yet online, Facebook claims they managed to provide more than a billion people with access to relevant basic internet services in one year. Sure, they didn’t do it by themselves, they worked with mobile operators across 17 countries. It’s the social network giant’s plan to connect the entire world, eventually, called internet.org. We’re pretty sure you’ve heard of it, by now.
As we said, 10 percent of the planet live in remote areas which means they don’t live within range of at least a 3G wireless signal. In these areas precisely, Facebook wants to send their drones. Aquila is a high-altitude, long-endurance aircraft that has a unique design and carbon-fiber frame.
When deployed, it will be able to circle a remote region for up to 90 days, beaming connectivity down to people from an impressive altitude of 60,000 to 90,000 feet (18,288 meters to 27,432 meters). As if this wasn’t enough, Mark Zuckerberg’s IT giant announced they also achieved a significant performance breakthrough in terms of laser communications.
This could work at a lower cost than satellites. Nice. Bringing connectivity to more of the world is good.