Hello, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC.

Today, we're asking how come in this digital age more than half of us aren't even able to get onto the internet?

Is it hurting economic growth?

Getting more people online, increasing that on a national level by 10%, can increase actual GDP viral 1.5%.

That's significant.

So is there a celestial solution?

Can a new generation of satellites really fix connectivity?

There are a number of different proposals, you know.

But essentially, everyone on Earth will have access at high bandwidth and quality and low cost to the internet within the next five to ten years.

Satellite technology and the internet. That's Business Daily from the BBC. The sound it was hoped of a revolution being born.

C.S flight line.

Flight line, yeah. We're going to put power on now, okay?

Copy it.

This is part of Facebook's promotional film dating back to 2016 of something called Akela,

the pioneering solar-powered drone that it launched, an aircraft with a monster wingspan but just 400 kilos in weight.

It was designed to fly up high into the stratosphere, way above Africa,

and do something that no one else, nothing else, has yet managed.

To beam out fast, cheap, internet broadband to hundreds of millions of Africans

formerly offline.

To remove the safety straps, then go fly.

Copy. We are ready for lunch. Good luck.

But sadly, this July, two years after its first launch, Facebook's Akela project was scrapped.

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