These projects include things like the solar-powered Aquila drone and plenty of open-source software and hardware initiatives for carriers. Indeed, there are so many projects that range from physical devices and networks to software that it’s sometimes hard to keep up.
“The one thing that has been consistent since the very beginning is that there’s no silver bullet,” Facebook director of engineering Yael Maguire told me during an interview at MWC.
What Facebook is trying to show here is that it’s possible to create an economically viable provider of rural mobile infrastructure. “It is very economically challenging to think about connecting small communities in rural parts of Peru, let alone other parts of the world,” Maguire said.The hope is that a business case can close for IpT.” Over time, Facebook hopes to bring this model to other places, too — assuming it works, which Maguire admits is not a given since this is very much an experiment at this point.If the model works, though, then the hope is that commercial vendors will see that there’s money to be made by connecting these small rural communities.
As the company also announced today, Facebook is investing in a new 750km open-access fiber project in Nigeria, for example, which will provide fiber access to more than one million people.
One thing Maguire also noted is that Facebook remains as committed to these infrastructure projects as it has ever been.