Facebook has made no secret of its plans to make sure that every single person in the world will have access to the internet, and by extension to the social media site, which currently has over 1.7 billion users already. One of the ways that it wants to do this is to mount a wireless platform on a solar-powered drone called the Aquila. The social media company recently tested its technology for beaming internet data and they were able to beam 20 Gbps for the same amount of energy that a light bulb requires.

As Facebook says on the OpenCellular project’s page, over 4 billion people in the world don’t have access to the internet. More than that, over 10 percent of the global population are in areas that cannot be reached by cellular signals.  

“Despite the widespread global adoption of mobile phones over the last 20 years, the cellular infrastructure required to support basic connectivity and more advanced capabilities like broadband is still unavailable or unaffordable in many parts of the world,” the post reads.

Thanks to the recent success of the social media company’s Connectivity Lab in a post by Mark Zuckerberg, this problem is much closer to being addressed. The test shows that it is possible to beam a blazing 20 Gbps of data across a range of 8 miles (13km) without using up too much energy. By installing this on the Aquila, the drone would not need to use too much of the power it gets from the sun in order to deliver internet connection in a wide area.

The solar-powered drone will be flying 60,000 feet in the year as it beams the connection to remote areas, Futurism reports, which would remove the constraints imposed by physical towers and cables. If the social network succeeds in its bid to have internet drones crowding the skies, they might even become the preferred sources of internet connection by developed nations.