At the F8 conference in Fort Mason, San Francisco on Thursday, Facebook\u2019s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, announced plans to roll out a new piece of hardware.<\/p>\n
Codenamed \u2018Aquila,\u2019 for the eagle the Greek god Zeuss rode across the sky (really!), the innovative piece of tech Facebook announced on Thursday is a drone designed to beam the internet down to millions of people worldwide,allowing the company to effectively supply its own infrastructure to difficult-to-reach areas.<\/p>\n
Aquila has the same wingspan as a 747 but is constructed of ultra-lightweight materials and is mostly wing, meaning it weighs less than a small car.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s going to need that light weight. It\u2019s designed to stay in the air for as long as three months at once. The design uses solar power to drive propellers, and will also require sufficient energy to let drones stay in contact with one another across wider areas to supply continuous access to the web.<\/p>\n
The drone will connect people below it to the internet via lasers fired from about 90, 000 feet (about 17 miles) above the surface of the earth, where drag is sufficiently low and there is little atmospheric turbulence.
\nSo how soon can you expect to see one of these slow-moving monsters in the skies over your home?<\/p>\n
Well,Facebook is cagey about the specifics, but the New York Times notes that commercial deployment \u2018may take years,\u2019 though the machines are due to be trialed this year. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg gets further into the details: \u2018As 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. Today, I’m excited to share that we’ve successfully completed our first test flight of these aircraft in the UK.\u2019 Zuckerburg went on to explain that: \u2018Aircraft like these will help connect the whole world because they can affordably serve the 10% of the world’s population that live in remote communities without existing internet infrastructure.\u2019
\nThe drones are currently under development at a UK company, Ascenta, that Facebook acquired last year. Eventually, the social media giant hopes to be running a fleet of 1, 000 drones, though how it hopes to get the governments of the world to \u2019like\u2019 the idea of filling their airspace with giant, remote-controlled laser platforms isn’t certain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At the F8 conference in Fort Mason, San Francisco on Thursday, Facebook\u2019s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, announced plans to roll out a new piece of hardware. Codenamed \u2018Aquila,\u2019 for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-technology"],"yoast_head":"\n