Facebook carries out drone test in the UK
Mark Zuckerberg has been flying drones above the UK.
Don’t worry, they’re not like Obama’s flying death machines – you won’t be getting poked from skies or anything like that. According to E&T, Britain was used as a testbed for Facebook’s “Aquila” drone, that the company hopes will one day help get the rest of the world connected to the web.
The solar powered drones apparently have a wingspan greater than a Boeing 737, but will “weigh less than a car” – and can apparently fly at 60,000 feet for months at a time. And astonishingly, this could apparently work out cheaper than laying fibre optic cables.
E&T quotes Zuck as saying “Aircraft like these will help connect the whole world because they can affordably serve the 10 per cent of the world’s population that live in remote communities without existing internet infrastructure”.
It’ll be interesting to see if the tests are successful. Perhaps soon we could literally have our internet coming from The Clouds.
