Facebook's drone is developed in the U.K. by the company's aerospace team. As soon as clear guidelines for flight regulation safety are in place, it will be tested in the U.S.The craft will be a solar powered device with a wingspan of a Boeing 737, operating at a height higher than commercial airlines, between 60,000 and 90,000 feet. The high altitude will help making the drones unaffected by the weather.
Facebook's drones will be carried into the atmosphere by a weather balloon since they do not have an engine or wheels. By using solar energy to control their glide, the drones will be able to stay airborne for months at a time. According to Facebook, its drones will offer internet speeds of 10 gigabits a second.
Facebook's vice president of global engineering and infrastructure, Jay Parikh, declared that the goal of the company is to accelerate the development of innovative technologies able to change dramatically "the economics of deploying internet infrastructure."
Facebook also explores other approaches to this goal, including terrestrial solutions and satellites. According to Parikh, the company's intention is not to build networks for themselves but to advance the state of these revolutionary technologies to the point that other operators can deploy them as viable solutions.
Mr. Parikh added that the drone's technology is a "significant breakthrough," using a laser that can deliver data transfer at 10s of Gb per second from more than 10 miles away to a target the size of a dime. This is 10x faster than the previous state-of-the-art in the industry.
The technology behind the new drones is part of Facebook's Internet.org initiative, aiming to conquer the globe in a Wi-Fi signal by bringing new technology to ISPs. But the project has its detractors, including Tim Berners-Lee, the original creator of the World Wide Web. In India, internet.org angered many in the tech community because rather than to offer the internet as a whole, it was offering access to only several websites.
According to critics, the internet access provided by Facebook will be limited again to a "walled-garden version" of the Internet. Berners-Lee considers any platform that doesn't offer open web access is just a step backward from enjoying the full benefits of today's democratizing power of the Internet.
In an interview published in The Guardian, Berners-Lee affirmed that we should say no to any offer on branded internet. And he added that Facebook's internet will not be actually free or in the public domain. Berners-Lee thinks that there are other better ways of giving something better to the public by reducing the price of internet connectivity, but only providing data connectivity to part of the network is a step backwards.
