Google and Facebook have
significantly expanded their rival plans to develop unmanned aircraft that can
provide broadband internet access from high above the Earth, the Guardian has
learned.
Both Facebook and Alphabet, Google’s
parent company, have quietly registered new drone designs with the US Federal
Aviation Administration.
Meanwhile, Alphabet is also planning secret
high-altitude airborne operations at Spaceport America in New Mexico, which
has been largely unused since Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo craft crashed in
December 2014, and an American subsidiary of Facebook has taken delivery of a
prototype solar-powered drone.
Much of the world’s attention is focused on
small drones, such as Alphabet’s Project Wing or Amazon’s Prime Air delivery
drones, but Google and
Facebook are also working on much larger drones that can operate far above
passenger jets, and even as high as 90,000 feet.
Flying for weeks or months at a time, such
drones could theoretically provide city-sized areas with high-speed internet
access, particularly in remote or undeveloped parts of the world.
“We’re working on ways to use drones and
satellites to connect the billion people who don’t live in range of existing
wireless networks,” said Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, in July. Last year,
Facebook set up an initiative with Nokia, Samsung and others called Internet.org to
provide some online access to the two-thirds of the world lacking a reliable
connection.
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