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back to article I want to launch thousands of drones, says Facebook's flying Wi-Fi router chief

“I maintain the Turing Test for us is if the air traffic controller cannot tell he's talking to an unmanned aircraft,” Facebook's chief flying Wi-Fi router drone man, Martin Gomez, told the Royal Aeronautical Society this morning. Speaking about Mark Zuckerberg's Internet.org walled-garden wheeze, Gomez explained to the …

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  1. M7S

    "with our saturation-level coverage of mobile phone masts and wired backhaul"

    Wired? You get wired?

    AND a mobile signal?

    In my part of the UK, not exactly terribly distant from the capital city, both of these are dreamed off by small children yet to learn that also the Santa they have met is actually one of his helpers, not the real one. I met another techie the other day living in a county town and nearer to the capital. his experiences (comms, not Santa) were broadly similar.

    1 0 Reply
    1. tr1ck5t3r
      Reply Icon

      Re: "with our saturation-level coverage of mobile phone masts and wired backhaul"

      Start here. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/smart-metering-implementation-programme-technical-specifications

      Look for the mesh network covering much of the UK and if that doesnt work, trying the 800Mhz+ frequency which gives you a radius of 30km, you'll soon find some wifi if you know where to look.

      0 0 Reply
  2. SimonL

    What's wrong with better use of satellites?

    Oh wait, presumably these drones do uplink and downlink?

    The big wi-fi in the sky :) LOL

    1 0 Reply
    1. David Roberts
      Reply Icon

      Satellites?

      I think that the construction and launch costs for these are orders of magnitude less than those for satellites.

      The latency should be a lot less as well.

      [I tried to work out the height in feet of the lowest communications satellite but gave up.]

      2 0 Reply
      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Satellites?

        {article}“Our goal is to be a low cost version of the terrestrial alternatives,” said Gomez. “Once you've installed fibre and protected it against vandalism you're done. We aim to be competitive against that.”{/article}

        {David Roberts} "I think that the construction and launch costs for these are orders of magnitude less than those for satellites.""

        I suspect that in the medium to longer term, rolling out fibre will be cheaper and more competitive than a fleet of very expensive drones which will fly for "only" weeks at time before coming back for service and maintenance.

        What worries me is that in the very short term, these drones may actually seem cheaper, thus seeing off anyone wanting to install a proper infrastructure and once established in an area, making it almost impossible later on down the line for anyone to even consider competing with an established service because of the up front capital costs and the now tied in "customers". I can see cash strapped sub-Saharan countries jumping at this "free" infrastructure, only to regret it a a few years down the line.

        4 0 Reply
  3. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    I guess he's been watching that amazon Advert

    where Jezza sends all those chromecasts off to frogland.

    3 0 Reply
  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Aerial carve up continues

    In the next few years we will see altitude sold off like frequencies.

    The EASA are already trying to appropriate everything above 50m, to sell to the highest bidder.

    "It's for safety we tell you, not money, so Amazon want to get their drones going and yes they would need to clear some pesky private RC users out but putting a 50m limit on private UAV and hobby aircraft is just because they bring down airliners, everyone knows that."

    "Why won't anyone believe me? Just for safety, Oh it's so unfair being in PR"

    3 0 Reply
    1. Haku
      Reply Icon

      Re: Aerial carve up continues

      The new proposals by the EASA should be looked at by everyone who flies multirotors and model aircraft, both hobbyist and commercial sector, because it appears they're trying to screw over everyone:

      http://droneinsider.org/new-easa-drone-regulations-threaten-kill-uk-european-drone-industry/

      Homebuilt drones only allowed to be up to 250g in weight?! And the height restricted to 50m (down from 121m) along with distance to 100m (down from 500m) here in the uk? Utter madness.

      3 0 Reply
      1. Haku
        Reply Icon

        Re: Aerial carve up continues

        To put the distance restriction proposal into more tangeable numbers:

        500 meters distance, 121.92 meters high = 95,794,285 cubic meters

        100 meters distance, 50 meters high = 1,571,428 cubic meters

        So you'll only be allowed to fly in 1.64% of the cubic area you used to be able to.

        2 0 Reply
        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Unhappy

          Re: Aerial carve up continues

          Many condolences to European private drone/RC owners if those rules go through. I guess the idjits who fly their drones near airports are sticking responsible owners with the hobby-destroying bill.

          Maybe you should buy some business like Amazon, where you can fly delivery drones (with a cut going to the EU/CAA/EAUSA I am sure), and be accepted by the ruling classes as a public servuce instead of a public nuisance.

          0 0 Reply
  5. Mage Silver badge

    Bonkers

    Why are these people allowed to to peddle this?

    With 60,000ft altitude the range is massive, forget cellular style frequency reuse. With massive range the capacity per user drops.

    Unless they going to use 400GHz to fixed LOS small dishes? Even so, one street of fibre is more capacity.

    6 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Bonkers

      Why are these people allowed to to peddle this?

      Sssssh! It makes for good press, which sells advertising and glorifies That Great Leader of the 21st century, St Zuck. As he has found a way to screw over gazillions of users better than even Microsoft, he is now the next Messiah for investors and the tech press so anything he farts is headline news - sanity checks are verboten lest it verily pisses Him off mightily.

      Meanwhile I, being the subversive BOFH I am, am going to investigate how to fly four drones in sync at high altitude with a large fishing net between them.

      3 0 Reply
    2. Ian Ringrose
      Reply Icon

      Not Bonkers

      First you cover the complete mostly empty area with drone based large are coverage, yes it only support a low density of users, but there is only a low density of people.

      Then put up cellular towers where there are more users, using the drones to do the back-hall, the towers can have dishes the automatically point at the correct drone.

      Then you put fibre in to the areas that need it.

      We are talking about villages with 20 people living in them, and 10 miles to the next village, not towns!

      1 0 Reply
  6. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    “I maintain the Turing Test for us is if the air traffic controller cannot tell he's talking to an unmanned aircraft,” Facebook's chief flying Wi-Fi router drone man, Martin Gomez, told the Royal Aeronautical Society this morning.

    Oh god, it talks...

    No, it won't talk. It will "talk" as in "sending data".

    And here's another idea:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/03/mod_many_drones_make_light_work/

    1. Write or steal software to "make a swarm of 20+ flying military robots".

    2. Hack FB drones.

    3. Profit. Mischief managed...

    1 0 Reply
  7. Tromos

    Flying botnet

    It will be hacked within days

    1 0 Reply
  8. Voland's right hand Silver badge

    Cleaning the desk

    I had to clean my desk from the coffee which splashed all over it after reading this one:

    Instead of providing overt surveillance,

    And WTF is F***Book if not 24x7 surveillance. Just run their Android App in a suitable logging environment to see exaclty what it does.

    7 1 Reply
  9. Anonymous Coward
    Terminator

    A great idea...

    Until they become self-aware and start bringing down airliners full of those pathetic humans.

    More seriously, going to be an annoying amount of outages, as one plane goes down and then a few hours are required to replace it. I think you could manage scheduled maintenance and upgrades easily, but changing wind and weather patterns and operating moving equipment and electrical systems for long periods at altitude is going to cause a lot of unplanned outages.

    1 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A great idea...

      Wonder how they will deal with sprites, I guess the idea is to avoid storms if there is enough clear space.

      1 0 Reply
  10. John 104

    Idiot

    What a dumb fuck solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Spread wi-fi to ultra remote areas for people with no computers to use. I'm sure adoption will be amazing.

    4 0 Reply
    1. Chris G
      Reply Icon

      Re: Idiot

      Don't worry they are going to drop solar powered FBcentric netbooks in carpet bombing patterns all over the third world, then the rest of the world can 'friend' the newbies and look at a couple of billion more selfies and cat pictures.

      3 0 Reply
  11. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge
    Alert

    Engineers

    In just the same way as engineers "unintentionally facilitated" the slurping of wifi access point data by StreetView cars, and engineers (allegedly) came up with the diesel emissions test defeat, what's to stop the engineers (it would never be from higher up, would it) adding some nefarious capabilities to these drones?

    When the Zuckerbergs get a white moggie, I'll be heading to the bunker.

    3 0 Reply
  12. Magani
    WTF?

    God complex?

    Our aircraft must have enough robustness to keep flying until it's safe to land.

    Somehow I feel the The Zuck thinks he can repeal the Law of Gravity.

    0 0 Reply
  13. Winkypop Silver badge
    Joke

    Just wait until

    One of those suckers falls on a driver-less car!

    The Twitterati will light up!

    1 0 Reply
  14. Tom 64
    Joke

    Honestly...

    I can't see this taking off.

    0 0 Reply
  15. Wiltshire

    My daughter tells me that Muse has already created an album about this

    Drones.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drones_(Muse_album)

    << Drones is a concept album following the protagonist's journey from abandonment to indoctrination as a "human drone" >>

    Sounds just right for the TwatFace droids.

    0 0 Reply
  16. cortland

    Can we

    Put up barrage balloons in our back yards? Oh, it'll be a nuisance, and expensive, too, blowin' up all them balloons at night just to be sure of our privacy, but worth it to keep the drones out of our yards...

    Be sure to put Aluminium foil strips under 'em, mind, to confuse the microwaves. Heh, heh, heh.

    1 1 Reply
  17. Black Rat
    Big Brother

    Roll on IPV6

    We'll all be assigned a personal surveillance drone

    0 0 Reply

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