Facebook's Air Force to Beam Us All With Wi-Fi

Facebook is one of many high-profile pioneers in spreading Internet access to remote areas, and major kudos to them for that noble effort.

After acquiring UK-based aircraft maker Ascenta, it looks like Facebook has (finally) begun building their own Air Force:

The planes would be solar-powered and would fly over suburban areas at an altitude of 20 kilometers, above where commercial airlines fly.

For more remote areas, like mountain ranges, Facebook and Connectivity Labs hope to put up satellites that not only cover the area with network access but talk between each other via free-space optical communication using infrared laser beams.

Flying drones? Satellites? Giant lasers?

The question we need to ask: Is this part of an arms race with Google, whose mysterious, possibly gnome-filled barges took the West Coast by storm in recent years? If so, where does it end?

Do our (virtual) lives hang in the balance between warring tech titans, played out in tiny battles between Amazon delivery drones and Facebook Wi-Fi flyers, all texting angry emoticons at each other, wreaking havoc on the speed and consistency of our broadband service?

Isn’t that basically the plot of Terminator 2?

On the bright side, Facebook’s flying Wi-Fi monkey-drones mean that this will never happen to you again: