Documents reveal Alphabet is testing solar-powered internet drones that use millimeter-wave transmissions
Project Skybender: Google's secretive 5G internet drone tests revealed — Trials at New Mexico's Spaceport Authority are using new millimetre wave technology to deliver data from drones - potentially 40 times faster than 4G
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands mid-race between the two ad-funded platforms to own the physical layer of internet access. Facebook has already flown its side of the ledger: it completed a full-scale Aquila prototype with a Boeing-737 wingspan and a 10-gigabit laser link last summer, after announcing the drone program in March. Alphabet's answer, revealed through documents about the New Mexico trials, is Project Skybender — solar drones beaming millimeter-wave signals pitched as up to 40 times faster than 4G.
The regulatory groundwork was laid just before the reveal: one day earlier, Google told the FCC that high-altitude transmitter testing fits within current rules, and its NASA arrangement already lets it fly Project Wing aircraft over private land. The Spaceport Authority site gives Alphabet a dedicated proving ground for the next layer of that strategy.
First-order effects
- Alphabet now has an active US test site at the Spaceport Authority for millimeter-wave drone transmissions, putting hardware in the air while rival Facebook's Aquila moves from prototype toward flight testing.
- The FCC becomes the immediate gatekeeper: Google's filings argue current rules suffice for high-altitude transmitters, so the agency faces early decisions on whether drone-based broadband stays inside existing licensing.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's Aquila bet on lasers forces a technology fork in aerial broadband — light-based links versus millimeter-wave radio — and whichever proves out first sets the cost and speed benchmark the other must match.
- Mobile carriers face a potential new class of competitor: if Pichai's earlier hints about a Google mobile network mature alongside Skybender, Alphabet would control both the access technology and the service riding on it.
Third-order effects
- If both programs hold course, connectivity infrastructure shifts from carrier-owned towers to platform-operated aerial fleets, with spectrum and altitude rules — not handset economics — becoming the binding constraint on who can serve the unconnected.
- A two-company duopoly over stratospheric broadband would concentrate gatekeeping of internet access in the same firms that already dominate search and social, a structure regulators have not yet had to price in.
The trend: Platform companies are racing to build their own airborne connectivity layers — drones, balloons, and lasers — turning internet access itself into a competitive front between Alphabet and Facebook.