With its Free Basics initiative, Facebook wants to bring Internet access to the billions of people who don't yet have Web access. In order to find those people, though, the company's engineers are building a world map based on satellite imagery that they hope will be more complete than any census ever taken.
The goal, according to a Facebook blog post, is fairly simple: match population patterns with the type of technology needed to deliver Internet access. A remote village could be brought online with a combination of Wi-Fi and cellular signals. Conventional terrestrial cables could link a string of fishing huts. The most isolated outposts could be served by a solar-powered drone that can fly for months at a time.
Cataloging these population patterns is not as simple as scanning a bunch of satellite images. More than 99 percent of the images Facebook is working with contain no human settlements at all. So its programmers modified the artificial intelligence engine that detects faces in users' photos, teaching it how to search for buildings instead.
Twenty countries, 21.6 million square kilometers and 350TB of imagery later, Facebook says its results are not only accurate enough to guide its connectivity efforts, but could also provide governments with a way to verify census data. The data will be released to the public later this year.
In the meantime, Facebook is developing the technologies to deliver Internet access at breakneck speed. According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the company's drone is already performing weekly test flights. It has the "wingspan of a 747 but weighs about as much as a car," he said during a keynote address today at MWC in Barcelona. "There are solar panels on the wings so it can stay aloft for three to six months at a time."
The drone will beam Internet to remote areas with a giant laser, which is proving challenging to design. Zuckerberg likened it to shooting a laser pointer from California and hitting the Statue of Liberty in New York.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.