The Verge: Facebook axes stratosphere internet drones

Published June 27, 2018 at 11:35 am

A child holds a drone during a drone awareness and safety demonstration on June 22, 2017, in regards to humanitarian drone corridor testing under the UNICEF-funded Humanitarian Drone Corridor testing project, in the hard-to-reach rural Chanthunthu Village Health Clinic in Kasungu. The government of Malawi, with assistance from UNICEF, is pilot testing the use of drones for humanitarian purposes in Kasungu District to see how the drones can be used for transporting blood and mucus samples for TB and HIV tests from hard to reach health centres and village clinic to central laboratories in the country to big hospitals where they will be quickly tested and returned to the rural health facilities. The drones will also be used for imaging in disaster areas, which are impassable to humans, to determine the extent of damage by floods and how victims can be assisted, as well as boosting telephone and internet network connectivity.

Photo by AFP

Facebook announced today that it is no longer pursuing its plan of developing its own high-flying drones for delivering internet, an initiative within its Aquila project that was started four years ago. The news was tucked away in a blog post titled “High altitude connectivity: The next chapter,” penned by Yael Maguire, a director of engineering at Facebook.

Initially, Aquila was Facebook’s bold stratosphere internet project that imagined gigantic drones running partially on solar power that could remain in flight for long periods of time and beam down LTE service to remote parts of the world. In broad terms, Aquila was one of many ways, alongside Internet.org and other initiatives, that Facebook is trying to help the developing world and remote parts of Earth get online, so that they too can become Facebook users.