San Francisco, July 10 : Facebook discontinued last year a small helicopter drone project that could temporarily replace cellular services in emergency situations, The Verge reported.
The project was discontinued a few months after being shown off at the F8 developer conference in May of 2017, said the report on Monday.
"Tether-tenna was a proof of concept project we were evaluating when we discussed it at F8 in early 2017," a spokesperson for Facebook was quoted as saying.
The idea was to send a helicopter equipped with telecommunications equipment hundreds of metres up in the air to be able to tether to fiber and power lines in places where wireless capacity was compromised due to disaster or other factors.
"It wasn't something we pursued further as we chose to focus our efforts on continued development and advancement of our Terragraph, millimeter-wave, and HAPS (high altitude platform station) programmes," the Facebook spokesperson added.
The Tether-tenna is, however, not the only aerial Internet project that Facebook has abandoned in recent times.
In June this year, Facebook announced it decided to abandon its plan to develop high-flying solar-powered drones called Aquila that was aimed to deliver Internet to nearly four billion people in remote parts of the world.
A high altitude platform station (HAPS) system, Aquila's mission, according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, was to connect the world and help people who do not have online access all the opportunities of the Internet.
Facebook began Aquila project in 2014. In 2017, the solar-powered drone successfully completed the second full-scale test flight.
Tether-tenna was a much smaller scale idea compared to Aquila.
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Jailed gangster-politician Mukhtar Ansari passed away on Thursday at the age of 60. Ansari had been admitted to a hospital in Banda district after experiencing a deterioration in his health, as confirmed by his lawyer.
According to reports, Ansari was initially admitted to Banda Medical College on Tuesday after complaining of abdominal pain. However, he was later discharged from the hospital. Allegations from Ansari's family members suggest that he may have been "poisoned" while in prison, a claim supported by Ansari himself prior to his hospitalization.
Ansari, a former five-time MLA from Mau, had faced convictions in eight cases over the past two years. He had been incarcerated in Banda jail at the time of his passing.