Internet use has become such a ubiquitous part of everyday life, it is hard to imagine living permanently disconnected from the World Wide Web. Even when our eyes aren’t glued to a screen, our mobile devices are set to pull emails, Facebook statuses, instant messages, sports scores or breaking news at a minute’s notice. The internet, particularly through social media, has forged a kind of global community. It is easy to forget that the majority of the world, approximately 65 percent, is not plugged in.
Whether or not this is a global crisis, many internet companies around the world see this internet-less majority as an opportunity to expand the horizons of their businesses. Facebook has joined other industry giants, such as Google, in a mission to connect the last two-thirds of the global population to the internet and, ultimately, to its own social network.
How can a private company pull off such an incredible feat? The Google Loon Project, a brainchild of the Project X laboratories, has experimented with wifi-enabled solar powered balloons. The goal is to get enough of these balloons into the stratosphere, which is about 20 km above sea level, to create a network of balloons moving around the world with Earth’s air currents. These balloons would be capable of communicating with each other as well as with users and servers on the ground.
However, coordinating the movement of these balloons within the stratosphere represents a significant challenge. Another difficulty is the lifespan of the balloons; balloons used in trial runs have fallen out of the atmosphere after a mere hundred days. This has led to concerns about increased ocean waste and the cost of balloon re- deployment.
The executives at Facebook believe that the answer to these issues lies in drone technology. While the United States Federal Aviation Administration has not yet permitted the commercial use of unmanned drone technology, companies such as Amazon and FedEx have already begun looking into the technology to expedite their shipping processes. Facebook has announced that it plans to buy up Titan Aerospace, a New Mexico-based drone manufacturer, fro $60 million.
The purchase seems insignificant compared to Facebook’s recent $16 billion purchase of the mobile instant messaging service WhatsApp. However, the implications of the purchase could well exceed what seems expected from the price. Like Google’s balloons, these drones would also reside in the stratosphere but they may last up to five years. Facebook also claims that the technology behind their initiative could be ready by 2015, five years ahead of Google’s scheduled release of the Loon Project.
While both companies have clear personal incentive in getting the world online and using their services, we all stand to benefit. Truly global access to the internet would represent a monumental achievement in human communication. This initiative would be cause for unprecedented access to information and educational tools to some of the most isolated and impoverished populations in the world. Providing this infrastructure could allow this group of over four billion to finally be heard in a new way.
