Here in the heart of hyperconnected Silicon Valley it is hard for many of us to fathom that two out of three people around the globe still do not have access to the Internet.
But that's the case, a fact not lost on leaders at companies like Facebook and Google. The latest evidence is Facebook's announcement yesterday that it is setting up a new lab geared to exploring how the company can build what one of its engineers calls "an Internet in the sky."
That also underscores the reason Facebook yesterday acquired a British company called Ascenta. Its founders helped to create the Zephyr, a solar-powered drone. The idea is to create a network of new types of satellites, drones and other unmanned aircraft that can beam Internet access down to the two-thirds of the world's population that currently remain unconnected.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been talking about the social network giant's global strategy a lot over recent months:
“Now the focus for us is actually kind of retooling — you’re going to see us retooling the company in a lot of ways — to go take on a lot of harder problems that fulfill this mission,” Zuckerberg said at a tech conference. “So, for example, connecting the next 5 billion people. It’s going to be really hard because a lot of them don’t have Internet access.”