Facebook Inc. is revealing more information about its unmanned aerial vehicle ambitions. The social networking giant plans to have a fleet of drones flying overhead at all times, in the future. They won’t be delivering products, like the Amazon Prime Air express package drones that Amazon.com, Inc. is trying to get approved by the Federal Aviation Administration. They won’t be spying Facebook users, either. Facebook wants its free-space optical communication drones to beam internet access to remote parts of the planet, in order to make off-the-grid locations a thing of the past.

Earlier this year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched the Facebook Connectivity Lab, with the goal of extending the internet to the billions of people across the globe who don’t have access. Former MIT Media Lab Researcher Yael Maguire, who is now the Engineering Director at the lab, discussed the company’s progress at the Social Good Summit in New York. Although the vehicles will be unmanned, Maguire doesn’t refer to them as drones. To convey their massive size, he calls them planes. It’s a fitting moniker, as they’ll be close to the size of a 747 airliner. The planes, and the project overall, have several significant hurdles to overcome.

In order for Connectivity Planes to remain airborne for months or years at a time, they’ll have to fly in the stratosphere, above the weather, and above commercial airspace. The low temperatures and low air density will help the aircraft fly more efficiently, which is important, since it will have to be completely solar powered. It will be operating in, what is now, a regulatory gray area. Connectivity Planes will fly between 60,000 and 90,000 feet in the air, where there aren’t any aircraft regulations. There are, however, regulations on pilot operator to drone ratios, and the strict 1 to 1 rule could prove to be a challenging obstacle. Maguire would prefer a regulatory environment that would allow one pilot to manage as many as 100 drones at a time.

Despite the challenges, Maguire is taking an assumptive stance. Connectivity Labs has identified 21 locations in Latin America, Asia, and Africa where it intends to deploy its connectivity aircrafts. They’re expected to begin testing in 2015. If all goes according to plans, data packed infrared laser beams will soon be raining down from , providing internet for all. Which of course means billions of new eyeballs viewing Facebook ads.

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