Facebook's solar-powered Internet drone, dubbed Aquila, with a wingspan of a Boeing 737 to begin testing this summer
Facebook, Moving Ahead with Drone, Plans Test This Summer — Facebook plans to test a version of its solar-powered drone this summer, a step in its efforts …
Context & Ripple Effects
In early 2015 Facebook committed to flying Aquila, a solar-powered drone with the wingspan of a 737, as its vehicle for beaming internet to unserved regions — and the subsequent record shows the plan held together. By July that year the company had built the full-scale Aquila prototype and a laser capable of moving data at 10 gigabits per second between aircraft.
The testing arc then unfolded on schedule: the inaugural flight of the first full-size drone followed in July 2016, and by mid-2017 a second test flew for 1 hour and 46 minutes and landed intact. Alongside the aircraft, Facebook opened up OpenCellular, an open-source wireless access platform whose hardware plans are free to researchers and manufacturers — connectivity stack plus delivery platform being built in parallel.
First-order effects
- Facebook's Connectivity program moves from design documents to flight data this summer, giving engineers real evidence on whether a solar wing can sustain station at altitude — the gating question before any service deployment.
- The 10-gigabit laser demonstrated with the prototype becomes the load-bearing component: without reliable air-to-air links, a fleet of relay drones cannot hand traffic across a coverage area.
Second-order effects
- Telecom operators in remote markets gain a potential wholesale partner rather than an immediate competitor — Facebook's model is to supply backhaul capacity that carriers and local providers distribute, shifting where network capex is spent.
- Open-source hardware like OpenCellular lowers the entry cost for equipment makers and researchers building ground infrastructure, pressuring proprietary vendors serving the same remote-access niche.
Third-order effects
- If high-altitude solar drones prove airworthy at scale, internet delivery splits into two layers — orbital satellites and stratospheric aircraft — with regulators forced to write new rules for long-duration unmanned flight in shared airspace.
- The pattern points toward connectivity treated as an advertising-adjacent growth investment by platforms: whoever funds the transport layer gains the audience layer on top of it, a structure Facebook is assembling piece by piece here.
The trend: Internet access is becoming a platform-layer business, with tech companies funding their own aerial and open-hardware delivery infrastructure rather than waiting for carriers to extend coverage.