Is it a surveillance drone, a delivery drone or a Facebook drone?!

Photograph: Reuters

Facebook has announced its first drone towards the Internet.org effort, a solar powered drone with high-speed internet laser. The scope of the project is to deliver internet in areas where installing the required infrastructure is too expensive or the places are hard to access. Code-named “Aquila”,the drone delivers high-speed internet by encoding and decoding laser signals to each individual.

It is crucial for our civilization to get everyone on the internet since people would benefit from the knowledge that resides on it as well as getting to know other cultures. Therefore this aircraft represents the key towards internet globalization.

The drone represents a major advancement in technology because it revolutionizes the way internet can be accessed as well as a major breakthrough in laser technology. It is easier to deploy an autonomous solar-powered drone instead of having wires throughout cities, and it replaces the installation process with production line manufacturing which saves time and money.

Based on Yael Maguire’s statement, the company’s engineering director of connectivity, deploying the aircraft in any environment is both easy and safe since it will operate between 18 km and 27 km, above the altitude of commercial airplanes, as well as above the  clouds and thus it is not affected by weather.

Owner: Wall Street Journal

Although this is a giant leap in science, the drone still needs to be tested on the field and verified how it handles real-life scenarios as well as the user load. Other issues that Facebook has to face are laws and regulations, but so far the US gave them permission to test.

Radu Nesiu