Facebook's plan to connect the world with lasers and drones is more than pie in the sky - CNET

When the plane does fly, it will be high above commercial aircraft at between 60,000 and 90,000 feet (1.8 and 2.7 km). This comes with its own challenges, primarily that it is extremely cold at that altitude and so the on-board equipment will have to be able to withstand low temperatures. Built from carbon fiber to keep it light but strong, the drone measures 138 feet (42 meters) wing tip to wing tip and weighs about 1,100 pounds (500 kg). Each plane will connect to a terminal on the ground in a community and the capacity passed down to it will be redistributed on the ground through LTE or Wi-Fi.

The grand vision for the drones is to get them to form a network -- "a backbone in the sky," as Maguire called it -- bridging communities and connecting them to the urban center. And this is where the lasers come in. They will sit on top of the drones, allowing them to communicate vehicle-to-vehicle.

Due to the fact the drones fly above the weather systems in our atmosphere, the lasers have an extremely clean environment to operate in, with nothing to throw them off course. Laser performance, said Maguire, is "an intense area of focus for us." He believes the team has just achieved a breakthrough by making the lasers 10 times faster than they have been in the past.

They have also built a prototype of the laser terminal that will eventually sit on top of the plane. It weighs just 7.7 pounds (3.5 kg) thanks to the fact it is made out of the same carbon fiber material as the drones themselves.

Mapping the unconnected

In order to know where to place the drones, the social network also had to overcome the challenge of pinpointing exactly where the unconnected people in the world live.

The only available data they could find came from a world census run by Columbia University. But when they zoomed in to look at individual settlements, it was nowhere near high enough resolution to work out where the drones will need to fly.

Members of Facebook's Connectivity Lab put their heads together with the company's machine leaing team and analysed publicly available satellite data around the world, using image recognition to identify signs of life.

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