State of Connectivity 2015

Affordable data plans and rising global incomes saw almost 3.2 billion people going online from desktop to smartphones and ipads in the year 2015 – Up from three billion in 2014 – Facebook’s latest report on global internet access has revealed.

Facebook is now applying its significant computing muscle toward creating maps of where people live and how that affects their internet connections. On the left, you can see the clear satellite images Facebook is basing its analysis on; on the right, the orange squares are the next best representation of human population distributions in the same area.

Ultimately, this new project is about helping Facebook’s bottom line: More Internet access gives the company more markets to expand into.

The project is part of Facebook’s Connectivity Labs, the technical arm of its Internet.org initiative that deals with drones, satellites, and lasers for delivering internet to rural areas and developing countries.

“Defining the specifications of the technologies that we are developing first requires accurate information of how people are aggregated in these areas”, Facebook stated.

Facebook DigitalGlobe satellite image of Naivasha, Kenya (left) and gridded population of the world v4 from CIESIN at Columbia University (right). Apparently, with the use of a technology involving artificial intelligence learning machine, the tech giant is using its vast reach and the social network’s photo tagging features to create an enormous map of where people live.

The new maps will allow it to determine which connectivity methods, such as Wi-Fi hotspots or cellular connections, will benefit people more. The researchers said neural networks typically need to be trained on large volumes of images to obtain sufficient accuracy but by using this approach they were able to reduce the number of training images to about 8,000 binary satellite shots from within one country.

But despite this, there are more than four billion people who still can’t post cat pictures on Facebook, or any other site for that matter.

The company says it will be releasing the data to the general public later this year.

The Connectivity Lab will release the data publicly later this year and said: “We believe this data has many more impactful applications, such as socio-economic research and risk assessment for natural disasters”.