Facebook is working on drones, satellites and lasers to deliver the internet to far-flung corners of the world, in its second big bet on future technology in a week.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and chief executive, said the company was working with leading experts from Nasa and acquiring a team from Ascenta, a five-person UK-based company whose founders helped create an early version of a solar-powered unmanned aircraft.
Internet.org, a Facebook-led effort to bring everyone in the world online, has made “good progress”, he said, but needed to design new technology to work.
“In our effort to connect the whole world with Internet.org, we’ve been working on ways to beam internet to people from the sky,” Mr Zuckerberg wrote in a post on the social network.
“Today we’re sharing some details of the work Facebook’s Connectivity Lab is doing to build drones, satellites and lasers to deliver the internet to everyone.”
The new team is already working on planes and satellites to provide internet connectivity. It believes it will require different solutions depending on the density of populations. In higher-density areas solar-powered drones can be quickly deployed and deliver reliable internet connections, it said, but in rural areas, satellites could beam internet access to the ground.
The Ascenta team, based in Somerset in England, will stay in the UK. In a short unsigned post on the site the group wrote about forming a “special partnership” with Facebook built on a “shared vision” of connecting developing countries.
“Facebook has demonstrated a serious commitment to this effort and we are more excited than ever about the potential for our technology and our future impact in the world,” they wrote.
Mr Zuckerberg’s announcement came less than 48 hours after Facebook said it had bought Oculus, a virtual reality headset maker, taking the company in an unexpected direction.
The $2bn Oculus deal was a bet that virtual reality could become the dominant internet platform after mobile – and an effort by Facebook to ensure its relevance for decades to come.
Mr Zuckerberg stressed that investors should not expect Facebook to do many of these kind of deals and that it was a “rare” event to have bought Oculus so soon after the $19bn acquisition of chat app WhatsApp last month.
Facebook and Google are in an arms race to acquire companies which provide a gamble on the future of technology. Google in the past six months has invested in Calico, a company which aims to preserve life, and bought Nest, a company which produces wireless smoke alarms and heating systems for ‘smart’ homes, as well as Boston Dynamics, the creator of the world’s fastest-running robot and animal-like machines supplied to the US military.
Amazon was the first of the major internet companies to experiment with drones, announcing in December that it was developing unmanned aerial drones to deliver packages to consumers within five years. But some drone experts derided the move as a publicity stunt ahead of the holiday shopping season.
Facebook did not disclose the terms of the deal with Ascenta, which has a “deep expertise” in designing and building high-altitude long-endurance aircraft. The Ascenta team has a history of working in the aerospace industry with companies including Boeing and Honeywell.
Facebook has also hired experts from Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, its Ames Research Center and the US National Optical Astronomy Observatory.