Facebook, Eutelsat to deliver broadband to Africa

“To connect people living in remote regions, traditional connectivity infrastructure is often hard and inefficient, so we need to invent new technologies”, Zuckerberg said. Operation is expected to start in the second half of 2016, at which point the pair will team up with local partners to connect residents to the service, according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Through this collaboration, Facebook will soon be able to get more Africans online by using terminals, satellites and Internet gateways.

The project marks the next step in the Internet.org initiative, with the company earlier this year testing solar-powered drones which could beam internet signals from the skies above the UK.

Eutelsat is already actively providing broadband services for professional use by Ku-band satellite, and will now set up a London-based business headed by Tiscali global Network founder Laurent Grimaldi, to focus on serving premium consumer and professional segments. The goal was to bring the Internet to locations that are now out of reach to mobile users. As previously mentioned, this initiative’s goal is to provide free access to basic Internet to the parts of the world where it isn’t available or affordable. Internet.org has recently been renamed Free Basics. Until April 2015, it provided free access via mobile data networks to a limited number of basic websites and services, but after widespread protests in India this was expanded to any sites that met Facebook’s development criteria.

He said: “I’m excited to announce our first project to deliver internet from space”. “We are looking forward to partnering with Eutelsat on this project and investigating new ways to use satellites to connect people in the most remote areas of the world more efficiently”. Aquila is a solar-powered aircraft that creates a 50-kilometer communications radius for up to 90 days.

It looks like the battle of the tech giants to bring Internet access – and their own associated services – to the next few billion people is starting to heat up.