Drones, Lasers, Satellites Key to Facebook Internet Access Plan

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a plan to get the two-thirds of the world’s population without Internet access online.
That plan can be summed up in just a few words: Drones, satellites and lasers.
The initiative is being spearheaded by internet.org, a new global initiative to make Internet access available to five billion new households by 2023. Zuckerberg heads the organization.
The founding members of internet.org — Facebook, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung — last fall revealed their lofty goal: to bring Internet access “to the two-thirds of the world who are not yet connected, and to bring the same opportunities to everyone that the connected third of the world has today.”

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Zuckerberg announced the organization’s intentions in a post on his social network today.
The following is an excerpt from his post:
In our effort to connect the whole world with Internet.org, we’ve been working on ways to beam Internet to people from the sky.
Today, we’re sharing some details of the work Facebook’s Connectivity Lab is doing to build drones, satellites and lasers to deliver the Internet to everyone.
Our goal with Internet.org is to make affordable access to basic Internet services available to every person in the world.
We’ve made good progress so far. Over the past year, our work in the Philippines and Paraguay alone has doubled the number of people using mobile data with the operators we’ve partnered with, helping three million new people access the Internet.
We’re going to continue building these partnerships, but connecting the whole world will require inventing new technology too. That’s what our Connectivity Lab focuses on, and there’s a lot more exciting work to do here.
The Connectivity Lab team, which includes the engineers behind Facebook’s infrastructure team and the Open Compute Project, now also includes some of the world’s top experts on aerospace technology such as a team from Ascenta, a British company with extensive expertise in designing and building high-altitude long-endurance (HALE) aircraft.
Other new members have come from organizations including NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA’s Ames Research Center, 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,” reads an internet.org press release.
“For suburban areas in limited geographical regions, we’ve 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.”
The team is currently exploring Free-space optical communication (FSO) — a method of using light to send data through space with invisible, infrared laser beams. FSO could, potentially, enable the team to significantly bolster the speed of Internet connections provided by satellites and drones.
http://www.sitepronews.com/2014/03/28/drones-lasers-satellites-key-to-facebook-internet-access-plan/