London: 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, The Guardian said. 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.
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