Facebook has for years explored ways to help improve mobile connectivity and bring more of the population in developed countries get online, ostensibly a humanitarian effort but more of a thinly veiled ploy to bring more people into its app ecosystem. That effort’s most visible projects have been Facebook’s Internet.org initiative, with its Free Basics and Express Wi-Fi offerings for fast-growing smartphone markets, and the discontinued Aquila project, which sought to fly large, solar-powered drones that could beam down internet much like Alphabet’s high-flying Loon helium balloons.
But Facebook was working on another method in secret that involved much smaller, bird-sized fixed-wing aircraft that could be used to boost smartphone data…
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