Facebook wants to expand Internet access throughout the world, including in developing countries, and the company plans to use lasers to do so.
The company s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday that employees have been working on a laser communication system to beam data from the sky.
This will dramatically increase the speed of sending data over long distances, he wrote in a Facebook post about the topic.
Developing the laser system is part of the company s Internet.org initiative to offer free basic Internet service to some of the poorest countries. Those efforts have faced criticism this year for threatening net neutrality — a principle to keep the Internet open and free — because the company limits the free Web service to certain websites such as Facebook and Wikipedia.
Facebook is also testing a solar-powered drone dubbed Aquila as part of Internet.org, the company announced in March during its annual developer conference.
Still, not all of Facebook s efforts to develop technology to deliver Internet access have gone as planned. The company reportedly scrapped plans to build and launch a satellite for as much as $1 billion, The Information reported in June, citing a person with direct knowledge of the project and a person briefed about it.
Zuckerberg posted about the laser system on his Facebook account:
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