Facebook has completed construction of its solar-powered, unmanned aircraft Aquila, designed to deliver radio internet coverage across the globe using lasers. And it's majestic.
The plane, developed as part of Facebook's Internet.org non-profit, has a wingspan greater than a commercial aircraft, weighs less than a car, and is designed to fly above 60,000ft for up to three months at a time. "I don't think anyone's flown anything for more than 14 days under power," said engineering lead at Facebook's aviation team, Andy Cox.
The body is made from T700 carbon fibre, making it three times as strong as steel, but lighter than aluminium. "We knew from initial calculations it had to be a very lightweight, very stiff design," said Cox, adding that the material is also "lifty", attempting to escape from the engineer's hands when he walked across a windy carpark with it one day.
Internet.org launched in 2013 as a collaboration between nonprofits and tech giants like Samsung, Nokia and Qualcomm, with a mission to bring internet access to the four billion people not yet online, living in underserved and remote regions across the globe. "This effort is important because 10 percent of the world's population lives in areas without existing internet infrastructure," said Mark Zuckerburg, announcing the plane's completion. "To affordably connect everyone, we need to build completely new technologies." "When you bring a road to a rural area, it always improves their lives. Similarly when you bring information hive into a place it will really improve their livelihood," added director of engineering laser communications at Facebook, Hamid Hemmati.
The plane will be part of a constellation of aircraft that will deliver radio internet coverage using laser technology. A mothership will receive the original radio internet signal from a ground station, before transmitting that on to the wider constellation.
Facebook has also made some technological leaps in this area, according to Zuckerburg. "We've successfully tested a new laser that can transmit data at 10 gigabits per second. That's ten times faster than any previous system, and it can accurately connect with a point the size of a dime from more than ten miles away."
Hemmati points out that humans have been using light to communicate and send messages for many years -- Facebook is just upping the ante. "We turn the [laser] beam on and off, but you do that billions of times a second," he explained. "At Facebook we’re working on advancing the state of the art by at least a factor of ten to 100. It poses challenges." "Using aircraft to connect communities using lasers might seem like science fiction," said Zuckerburg. "But science fiction is often just science before its time. Over the coming months, we will test these systems in the real world and continue refining them so we can turn their promise into reality."
Through Facebook's own Connectivity Lab, engineers are looking at ways to deliver affordable internet using traditional networks, as well as satellite and aircraft. "Our intention is not to build networks and then operate them ourselves, but rather to quickly advance the state of these technologies to the point that they become viable solutions for operators and other partners to deploy," said VP of global engineering and infrastructure explains.
Aquila, which could fly as high as 90,000 feet, is the first dramatic step towards that future. The greatest test comes next, though, when the team begins to see how the plane fares in the skies.
Facebook is not the only company working in this sector. Google is exploring various tools to get the rest of the globe online, last year spending $1 billion on a fleet of satellites and buying Skybox Imaging for $500m. Its plan to launch networked balloons -- Project Loon -- is already well on its way to getting off the ground as well, with the news this week that the Sri Lankan government is partnering with Google to deliver internet access across the entire country. The full fleet of balloon launches is slated to be completed by March 2016.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
