Facebook Chairman & CEO Mark Zuckerberg has declared that his wide-winged, solar-powered, wireless Internet hotspot drone tested successfully.
The drone prototype “Aquila” test flight took place in Britain, and Facebook insists it was a milestone in Internet history. The drone was developed by Ascenta, a British designer of solar-powered drones bought by Facebook last year.
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“As part of our Internet.org effort to connect the world, we’ve designed unmanned aircraft that can beam internet access down to people from the sky, ” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. “We’ve successfully completed our first test flight of these aircraft in Britain… Aircraft like these will help connect the whole world because they can affordably serve the 10 percent of the world’s population that live in remote communities without existing Internet infrastructure.”
The Facebook drone wingspan is bigger than that of a Boeing 737, and weighs as much as a small car, Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technology officer said at conference in San Francisco.
“The idea is to loiter over an area for months at a time and beam down Internet service, ” Schroepfer said.
Sun-powered Drones will fly at altitudes of 60, 000 feet or higher and stay in place for months, according to Zuckerberg. They will eventually provide Internet access to between one and three billion users in remote areas.
Schroepfer is concerned, though, that there’s such a thing as too much globally exchanged information: “If we achieve our first goal, get everyone on the internet, build services at scale for the entire planet, we create this new problem: so much information you can’t consume the stuff that’s important to you, ” he said.
