Facebook's Aquila Flies...and OpenCellular

In Barcelona in February I attended a "keynote' with Mark Zuckerberg which was actually an on-stage interview. To read what I said about it then, look at MWC: Zuckerberg Interview. One of the points he made there is that half the world needs things like 5G so that we can have nice things like virtual reality. But we must not forget the other half of the world which doesn't yet have the internet at all. There are about 1.5B people who have no access to mobile internet at all.

Of course a cynic might say that "of course he would say that, he wants everyone to use Facebook." To give credit to Mark, this is not just mouthing good-sounding pabulum; Facebook is trying to do something about it.

First there was an initiative in India to provide free internet. It ran afoul of various Indian laws that make cross-subsidy illegal (or something like that, the details are not that clear).

But recently Facebook announced two significant things.

Aquila Flies

Aquila is a plane intended to provide an internet platform to very remote areas of the world that can't be reached by conventional basestation infrastructure. Think the Amazon rain forest, for example. But it is a plane like no other. It is intended to circle around an area at 60,000 feet for several months at a time. The top of the wings are solar panels that provide the power. It has the wingspan of a Boeing 737 but only weighs 1000 pounds, with plans to make it still lighter. Half of that weight is batteries (it has to operate at night, of course, when the solar power is not producing). The total power budget is 5,000W for the engines, avionics, lights and the internet communications equipment. At altitude it will fly at about 80 mph.

The communications equipment is unique, too. It will use directed lasers. It will be able to aim its beam accurately enough to hit a dime at a distance of eight miles. While the plane is moving. I'm not quite sure how this works since it is planned to fly at 60,000 feet, which I make to be over 11 miles.

On June 28, Aquila had its first flight in Arizona. It stayed in the air for an hour and a half. As Facebook put it:

We’re proud to announce the successful first test flight of Aquila, the solar airplane we designed to bring internet access to people living in remote locations. This innovative plane has the wingspan of an airliner but weighs less than a small car and flies on roughly the power of three blowdryers.

Of course there remain lots of challenges, but this is a major milestone after just two years of development. See the flight (3 minutes).

Facebook OpenCellular Project

You may already know that Fecebook took their in-house server design and put it in the public domain as the Open Compute Project. You can read more about this at my blog post from the Open Server Summit earlier this year. In early July, Facebook did something similar and created an Open Cellular platform that they will put in the public domain. Again, this is driven by the need to get costs down for parts of the world that are never going to be reached by traditional basestations with fiber or microwave backhaul. As with servers, they expect that by open sourcing the design and pushing standardization, costs will decrease further.

The platform can be used with a wide range of communications options, from a network-in-a-box to an access point supporting everything from 2G cellular to LTE. There are two main subsystems, a general-purpose compute platform, and a radio subsystem with integrated analog front-end.

The above picture shows the hardware (from left to right): strap, mounting bracket, enclosure, RF board, general-purpose board. The enclosure is roughly the size of a shoebox. It can support 1,500 people at distances of up to 10km.

Facebook's summary of the status is:

We are currently testing the system in our labs at Facebook HQ and working with OEM and ODM partners to make the OpenCellular platform widely available. So far in our lab at Facebook, we are able to send and receive SMS messages, make voice calls, and use basic data connectivity using 2G implementation on our platform. We also aim to partner with TIP members to select trial locations for further validation of technical, functional, and operational aspects of the hardware.

More information on OpenCellular is on the Facebook website.

Late news: Facebook's Internet.org satellite didn't fly. It was destroyed on the launchpad during a test of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket last Thursday. The satellite was intended to provide internet to sub-saharan Africa.

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