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posted by Fnord666 on Monday July 23 2018, @09:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the spacial-mesh dept.

This May, sleuths at IEEE Spectrum revealed something exciting -- Facebook appeared to be secrely working on an experimental satellite that could beam internet down to Earth using millimeter wave radio signals.

Now, Facebook has confirmed to Wired and CNET that the satellite, dubbed Athena, is indeed a Facebook project -- and that Facebook is a believer in satellite internet technology.

"While we have nothing to share about specific projects at this time, we believe satellite technology will be an important enabler of the next generation of broadband infrastructure, making it possible to bring broadband connectivity to rural regions where internet connectivity is lacking or non-existent," a Facebook spokesperson told CNET and Wired.

But Wired does have more to share about this specific project. Using a Freedom of Information Act request, Wired says it obtained emails from the FCC that reportedly show Facebook plans to launch the Athena satellite in early 2019. In space launch terms, that's coming up pretty dang fast.


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  • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday July 23 2018, @02:50PM (1 child)

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Monday July 23 2018, @02:50PM (#711252) Journal

    A real-time map of where their users are calling from, perhaps, and/or other correlation data. Doesn't have to be video.

    But let's keep drinking the monopoly Kool-Aid instead, in letting organizations become exa-corps. (If not in the literal sense of the word though I have my questions, definitely the Parker Brothers sense of the word. Now that I think about it, maybe I'd like some literal Kool-Aid too....)

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 23 2018, @04:57PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 23 2018, @04:57PM (#711312)

    You're not getting real-time (or even video) feed from stacking some low-res images cropped out of panorama stills taken during consecutive passes by different sats. What you'll get is an image of the static landscape, minus moving objects because they will be disregarded as noise by the stacking algorithm.

    People using the Farcebook app probably already volunteer their precise GPS location (I have no idea since I'm not installing that on my phone), might as well just overlay that on a map based on existing carthographic material.

    Signal triangulation from a ring of low-orbiting (i.e. very fast) satellites might be something the NSA or CIA would be interested in, but they seem to be confident enough targeting their missiles based on the data regular cell towers combined with IMSI catcher-wielding drones give them.