Facebook moves to get world’s most remote regions online using drones, satellites

The US web giant has bought Ascenta, a tiny engineering company run by chief engineer Andrew Cox, for an estimated £12.5million.Mr Cox has helped set records for the longest flights for unmanned aircraft powered by the sun.Its experts will now be working on drones intended to fly 60,000ft above the earth for months at a […]

The US web giant has bought Ascenta, a tiny engineering company run by chief engineer Andrew Cox, for an estimated £12.5million.
Mr Cox has helped set records for the longest flights for unmanned aircraft powered by the sun.
Its experts will now be working on drones intended to fly 60,000ft above the earth for months at a time to beam broadband signals to the Third World.
Details of the plan were revealed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in a post on his personal page on the site and form part of a project called Internet.org set up to extend the reach of the internet.
  ‘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,’ he wrote.
‘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.’
DATA SENT FROM 60,000FT
Facebook aims to use a mix of solar-powered aircraft and low-orbit satellites to beam signals carrying the internet to hard-to-reach locations.
The drones, flying at 60,000ft, will be capable of staying in the air for months at a time.
They are relatively cheap will be best for suburban areas that do not have the cables or infrastructure to carry internet or telephone signals.
The drones are effectively mobile phone masts in the sky and bounce smartphone communications between satellites and base stations on Earth.
Low-orbit and geosynchronous satellites, which have orbits that match the Earth’s rotation and are effectively stationary, will cover more remote areas in Africa and Asia.
The internet access would be transmitted in the form of free-space optical communication, or FSO, which transmits data using infrared laser beams.
It was previously known as High Altitude Engineering and has only two directors, Mr Cox, 51, and his wife Helen.
Mr Cox has had a long career in the aerospace industry. He was a key member of the team at British defence technology company Qinetiq that created the Zephyr drone that holds the record for an unmanned flight, which lasted two weeks.
 ‘We’re looking at a new type of plane architecture that flies at roughly 20,000m, because that’s a point where winds are at their lowest, it’s above commercial airliners, it’s even above the weather, and actually it can stay in the air for months at a time,’ he said.