Facebook’s Connectivity Lab has been hard at work developing ambitious solutions to the challenge of providing internet connectivity to the roughly two-thirds of the world living without it. Today, the social network giant revealed that its aircraft and laser programs have reached major milestones that could soon put internet access in the hands of over 4 billion people.

“Our goal is to accelerate the development of a new set of technologies that can drastically change the economics of deploying internet infrastructure,” said Facebook’s Jay Parikh, VP of Global Engineering and Infrastructure, in a statement. “We are exploring a number of different approaches to this challenge, including aircraft, satellites and terrestrial solutions. Our intention is not to build networks and then operate them ourselves, but rather to quickly advance the state of these technologies to the point that they become viable solutions for operators and other partners to deploy.”

The first of these milestones is the creation of Aquila, a high-altitude, long-endurance drone developed by Facebook’s aircraft team in the U.K. Aquila is capable of remaining airborne for over 90 days flying at an altitude of 60,000 to 90,000 feet, roughly double the altitude of most commercial airliners. According to Parikh, Aquila has a wingspan equivalent to a 737 but with drastically lower weight thanks to a carbon-fiber frame. The purpose of the drone is to circle remote regions without internet access, beaming connectivity to the ground.

The other milestone announced by Facebook is a “significant performance breakthrough” by the company’s laser communications team in Woodland Hills, California. The team has succeeded in transferring data at 10s of gigabits-per-second using lasers “to a target the size of a dime from more than 10 miles away.” Parikh notes that this rate is approximately 10 times faster than current state-of-the-art laser technology.

“We are now starting to test these lasers in real-world conditions,” he said. “When finished, our laser communications system can be used to connect our aircraft with each other and with the ground, making it possible to create a stratospheric network that can extend to even the remotest regions of the world.”

You can watch a video by Facebook showcasing its recent breakthroughs here.

Image courtesy of Facebook