Facebook is looking to acquire Titan Aerospace, a manufacturer of drones, for about $60 million. The move supports Facebook’s push for the Internet.org project, an initiative to connect two-thirds of the world’s population that doesn’t yet have access to the Internet.
Founding partners of Internet.org include Ericsson, Nokia, MediaTek, Opera, Samsung and Qualcomm.
“The Internet is really the backbone of the knowledge economy. If everyone had access to those basic tools, we’d all be able to benefit from all of the innovation and creativity and ideas that everyone had,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, explained in an Internet.org video.
Facebook wants to build a fleet – 11,000 aircrafts – to cover Africa with a free Wi-Fi signal. Brough Turner, CEO of netBlazr, told M2M Evolution that finding the platform is the hardest part of delivering this signal. There are considerations like battery life, the orbit of the drones and what space they’re flying in. Once you’re up above 60,000 feet, you no longer have to consider the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). You need a platform that can be powered with solar cells and also has enough battery capacity to survive during the night, he says.
Titan Aerospace’s Solara protype is the sought-after drone: It’s a lightweight solar-powered drone that can fly 65,000 feet for five years without landing.
Image via ITProPortal
Turner also explained that this is not the first time a company has experimented with using airspace as a source to provide connectivity. Google, for example, also has a similar project called Project Loon, which uses balloons to connect people to the Internet.
“The platform is the issue. The radio frequency stuff is easy. The radio part is well-understood – there’s spectrum from TV channels all the way up to 100GHZ. People completely understand how much of it gets through how much atmosphere. Astronomers have been looking at radio signals from outer space,” Turner explained. “Wi-Fi spectrum is just fine. The issue is the platform. Are they really going to succeed? Nobody has yet. But a lot of people are looking into how you can get a platform up there, make it usable and relatively stationary, and not have to service it all the time.”
We also caught up with Joseph Dans, president and senior creative director of Rogue Wave Creative Group, who brought up security concerns with drones: There’s always a possibility and concern that a device completely controlled by software could be compromised – how do we react if and when that happens? He also mentioned people’s reactions to radiation exposure from these types of waves, but that was something Turner quickly shut down.
“Radio and TV waves pass through the atmosphere and don’t get absorbed – and unless you’re wearing a tin hat, they’re passing through you right now. There are no known health effects,” he said.
The Solara platform is capable of supporting wide-range voice and data communications. It extends line of sight (LOS) radios to beyond line of sight (BLOS) communications using small, low-cost radio repeaters and specialty communication equipment on the Solara platform. The repeater receives the signals from transmitters on the selected radio frequency channel and then retransmits them on another frequency to a receiver. Users have full remote control capability of all functions, and voice and data can be retransmitted across a broad range of frequencies and waveforms.
“If this is done and it works, it is substantially better than satellite-based stuff, which is typically using satellites in geosynchronous orbit,” Turner explained. “In order to have the satellite stay in the same place above the earth, it has to be more than 22,000 miles out there. If you think about the speed of light – 186,000 miles per second – if your satellite is 22,500 miles up, the round trip is about 45,000 miles, which means one-quarter of a second.”
That’s one-quarter of a second of latency that significantly affects voice and Web browsing. Browsers have to make round trips to the source, which makes speed considerably low when browsers are requesting so many different features. If these drones are flying around 65,000 feet, that’s about 12 miles up -- 12 miles is a lot closer than 22,500.
“Satellite Internet is notoriously painful. Nobody would use satellite Internet if they could use something faster,” Turner said. “This would be an incredibly better way to receive your Internet than satellite, but not as good as a physical wire.”
Facebook’s recent acquisition of WhatsApp could also be used with the drone-powered systems in the effort to make the Internet more accessible – bringing Wi-Fi to countries with no or weak Internet connections enables them to send messages via WhatsApp. The company’s acquisition of Onavo, which is reportedly working on data compression technologies, could also help by requiring less transmitted data.
Edited by
Blaise McNamee
