Facebook Wants Drones To Connect the Developing World 48
judgecorp writes "Facebook is reportedly hoping to buy drone specialist Titan Aerospace in order to provide airborne relays for Internet connectivity in developing countries, as part of its internet.org project. The solar-powered drones are classified as "atmospheric satellites" and can fly for five years. The rumoured project sounds quite similar to Google's Project Loon, which proposes using balloons for the same job." More coverage at SlashCloud, which notes that the purchase is rumored but not yet publicly confirmed.
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A) Have a computer or tablet?
B) Have nothing better to do than "like" other starving neighbors' boring kid pictures?
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Props to B. But I have a solution based on this. Load drone with 200 lbs of pelleted vegetable seeds encased in dirt, in addition to your 25 lbs of communication equipment and a 25 lb electronic pellet release system. Whenever the batteries reach full capacity, use excess energy from the solar panels to release pellets. After a year or two, the starvation problem will take care of itself, and you still have three years + left of station keeping on the "atmospheric satellite" to sell the now more prospe
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water might be a bigger problem than seed delivery. Solve the, keep plants appropriately watered and competing seeds at bay and you might have something worth thinking about.
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Scatter enough seed, and you'll out-compete the weeds. Use appropriate (native) vegetables, and you'll have plants that are matched to the normal rainfall in the area. Scatter enough of them, and mere gathering can take care of the rest.
Of course, this takes interviewing the indigenous people in the area to find out what their favorite vegetables were *before* Monsanto came in to feed them western foods.
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Scatter enough seed, and you'll out-compete the weeds. Use appropriate (native) vegetables, and you'll have plants that are matched to the normal rainfall in the area. Scatter enough of them, and mere gathering can take care of the rest.
I see you're truly a Marxist, even in the area of agriculture. Because naivety worked for Soviet agriculture so well...
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It's actually a combination of guerrilla gardening [guerrillagardening.org] and permaculture [organicgardening.com] and is based in actual experiments. It's also decentralized- you don't actually need drones to do the dropping, anybody can do this in their neighborhood, just by scattering seed.
The idea of using it in the third world is to avoid situations where local governments hoard the foreign aid- if the plants are native, widely scattered, and numerous enough to out-compete the weeds, you don't need fancy NGO programs for the harvest- the starvin
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*sniffs*
No, that's the distinct odor of things-you'd-think-were-awesome-if-someone-else-was-doing-them.
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These would still have to downlink somewhere, probably into the same "state owned" network as everyone else. FB or whomever would, I'm sure, play along with whatever rules, so long as it meant people got airtime and they got money.
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Why? net traffic stays within the aloft net, uplink/downlink can either through the airborne net to a lower tariff location or via satellite (since only data in/out would be out of area traffic). Caching of popular data (youtube, buzzfeed, whatever) could be done at a ground station.
Not that high (Score:2)
According to this article, the coverage for these will be an 18-mile radius.
http://arstechnica.com/informa... [arstechnica.com]
While an air-to-air component could extend that with multiple drones, the whole system is still likely to link to a ground station within a small geographical area. That's why I don't think you'd get out of the "state owned" area, if these were ever employed in such a place.
A major point of these would be to eliminate the satellite link, so a further uplink to a satellite just seems ridiculous.
ummm (Score:2)
Do you mean blimps or mini blimps not drones?
I have not heard of solar powered drones.
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They got a picture right in the article. Sure as hell looks like a plane to me. Granted an unnamed powered blimp would be a drone as well.
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I would like to know how they keep a plane on "stationkeeping" enough to serve as a GPS platform though. I'd think turbulence alone would mess that up, and doesn't a plane have to keep *some* airspeed to stay up?
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You have now.
http://titanaerospace.com/ [titanaerospace.com]
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"drone" implies a level of autonomous or remote control, not necessarily the method it uses for flight.
These don't look to be blimps, btw. http://titanaerospace.com/plat... [titanaerospace.com]
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They're largely a century or two behind us in socio-economic development, especially in the rural areas. But they have the benefit of cheap modern technology, so you'd better believe they're developing FAR faster than we did.
"Developing world" is a moving target (Score:2)
Hate to break it to you, but while some preconceptions still exist the data shows that South America largely exited the so-called "third world" stage some time ago - there's still problem areas, but for the most part you've pretty much caught up with the developed world by most measures. As a rule you're not yet as rich, but you've managed to harness most of the major benefits of modern technology. Asia and Africa are the remaining problem spots, and much of Asia is currently progressing quite rapidly.
It's
The developing world (Score:2)
typical proprietary hacks (Score:2)
The solution is pretty clear: just implement RFC 1149 and RFC 2460 and connectivity will be fine in even remote areas.
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I think you mean RFC 2549, not RFC 2460.
A great idea, however... (Score:2)
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So you start by listing several technical reasons why this wouldn't work in a developing country and then go on to state that you would like to see this used in rural America (where you ignore the very same technical limitations you just listed). Does only Africa have storm clouds and trouble with bad wifi drivers? Do you really think the system won't work, or is that just a flimsy explanation to try to prevent 'them' from getting it so you can have it yourself?
-AndrewBuck
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Ok, that makes a bit more sense. I do understand your point about custom WIFI protocols but I don't think that those would actually be needed. If I recall correctly you can push wifi out to several km's fairly esily with the standard protocol and you don't start to have ack timeout issues until something like 100 km, and even then all you need to do is allow longer ack timeout values (this is technically a "custom" protocol then but not a major change).
You do have a point about people in the US being more
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Everyone's got something of value, even if it's only their vote...
What could possibly go wrong???? (Score:1)
ssia
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Education.
In most places, education is very non-free.
The cost of even a 'nice' tablet like a nexus 7, over a year will be completely eclipsed if it enables remote learning.
Well, at least we know (Score:2)
...they'll be very attractive drones. [slashdot.org]
solve the world problem (Score:2)
Internet boom (Score:1)
brought to you by the double edged sword of faceboom^Hk
huh (Score:2)
You think the likely corrupt governments of poor countries will sit idly by and allow a foreign agent to fly drones in their airspace? Particularly if the purported purpose of the drones is to enable seditious speech and organizing?
In the future... (Score:2)
On the bright side, though, I can see battles a-brewing over providing even Facebook "enhanced" Internet to oppressed people from the air. Harder to cut that cable, ya know?
ARGH! (Score:2)
Can Facebook go away already? Head the way of the Walkman... in to history and a humorous glance back at what it was, "Wow, did we really use that? Scary!"