Facebook has announced a plan which could use aeroplanes and satellites to provide Internet connectivity.
The company’s new Connectivity Lab boasts a team that is working on new aerospace and communication technologies to advance the Internet.org mission of improving and extending Internet access.
The Lab, which includes some of the world’s top experts from Ascenta, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA’s Ames Research Centre, and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, is already working on new delivery platforms including planes and satellites to provide connectivity.
Internet.org is a global partnership launched by Facebook to make the Internet available to the two thirds of the world’s population that doesn’t have it.
Begun by the same engineering talent behind Facebook’s infrastructure team and the Open Compute Project, the Connectivity Lab team has been working on developing new platforms for connectivity on the ground, in the air and in orbit.
The team includes some of the world’s top experts on aerospace technology, including the team from Ascenta, a UK-based company with a deep expertise in designing and building high-altitude long-endurance (HALE) aircraft.
The five-member Ascenta team has combined more than 100 years of experience in the aerospace industry including leadership positions with QinetiQ, Boeing, Honeywell and the Harris Corporation. It has worked on noteworthy projects like the Breitling Orbiter and early versions of Zephyr, which became the world’s longest flying solar-powered unmanned aircraft.
Other recent additions to the team have come from organisations including NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA’s Ames Research Centre, and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.
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.
For suburban areas in limited geographical regions, it has been working on solar-powered high altitude, long endurance aircraft that can stay aloft for months, be quickly deployed and deliver reliable Internet connections.
For lower density areas, low-Earth orbit and geosynchronous satellites can beam Internet access to the ground.
For all of these systems, the team is looking at free-space optical (FSO) communication, a way of using light to transmit data through space using invisible, infrared laser beams. FSO is a promising technology that potentially allows us to dramatically boost the speed of Internet connections provided by satellites and drones.
