BackGoogle, Facebook now battle it out in the skies
While Google is bringing Internet via balloons, Facebook is going to beam it via drones and lasers
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It’s a high-altitude contest between two of the hottest tech giants, Google and Facebook. Google’s Project Loon and Facebook’s Aquila are battling it out in the skies. The goal is the same for both: covering two-thirds of the world’s population that is unconnected and living in remote areas with affordable, universal access to the Internet.
Google’s Project Loon
On 28 July, Mangala Samaraweera, the foreign minister of Sri Lanka announced a historic partnership with Google to cover every inch of Sri Lanka with high-speed Internet coverage via its Project Loon. If this comes to fruition, Sri Lanka will become the first country in the world to have universal Internet coverage.
So what is project Loon? Loon was born out of a long-standing fascination that Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had with high-altitude balloons, where a network of balloons travelling on the edge of space are designed to connect people in rural and remote areas, help fill coverage gaps, and bring people back online after disasters.
Project Loon balloons will float in the stratosphere, twice as high as airplanes and the weather. Loon balloons will be able to go where they’re needed by rising or descending into a layer of wind blowing in the desired direction of travel. Each balloon can provide connectivity to a ground area about 40 km in diameter using a wireless communications technology called LTE (long-term evolution), commonly known as 4G LTE. To use LTE, Project Loon has partnered with telecommunications companies to share cellular spectrum. It will help people access Internet everywhere directly from their phones and other LTE-enabled devices. The balloons will relay wireless traffic from cell phones and other devices back to the global Internet using high-speed links.
For more details, refer to the Loon website.
Facebook’s Aquila aircraft
While Google is bringing Internet via balloons, Facebook is going to beam it via drones and lasers. On 30 July, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company had completed construction on its first, full-scale aircraft, named Aquila. Essentially a solar-powered, unmanned aircraft, Aquila can beam data to the ground using lasers, while airborne. According to the company’s press release, Aquila has the wingspan of a Boeing 737 but weighs hundreds of times less, thanks to its unique design and carbon-fiber frame. When deployed, it will be able to circle a remote region for up to 90 days, beaming connectivity down to people from an altitude of 60,000 to 90,000 feet.
Zuckerberg also mentioned that Facebook has designed and lab-tested a laser that can deliver data at 10 times faster speed than the previous state-of-the-art in the industry.
Both these initiatives are a part of Facebook’s global Internet.org project that was launched last year in collaboration with technology companies in a bid to make Internet accessible to more people by providing them access to a range of free basic services. Facebook claims on their website that through this altruistic endeavour they have been able to offer free basic internet services to millions of people across Asia, Africa and Latin America. In his post announcing the completion of Aquila, Zuckerberg explained, “This effort is important because 10% of the world’s population lives in areas without existing internet infrastructure. To affordably connect everyone, we need to build completely new technologies."
While both companies remain tight-lipped about costs, it would be naive to imagine that providing an Internet blanket would not be a lucrative proposition for the companies.
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