Facebook announced the completion of its first full-scale drone, dubbed Aquila, designed to provide internet connectivity to remote parts of the world.

The drone, which took 14 months to build, has the wingspan of a 737 Boeing aircraft, but weighs “hundreds of times less”, the company said in a statement.

Once deployed, the drone will be able to stay airborne for up to 90 days, “beaming connectivity down to people from an altitude of 60,000 to 90,000 feet”.

Facebook said it will begin testing the aircraft later this year in the US.

The latest development is part of the company’s wider internet.org scheme, which is designed to find ways to provide connectivity to more than 4 billion people who do not have internet access.

Facebook said 10 per cent of the world’s population live in areas that do not have infrastructure technologies used everywhere else, such as fibre optic cables and cell towers, “which may be a challenge to deploy cost effectively in these regions”.

Jay Parikh, VP of global engineering, said Facebook’s goal is to “accelerate the deployment of a new set of technologies that can drastically change the economics of deploying internet infrastructure”.

“We are exploring a number of different approaches to this challenge, including aircraft, satellites and terrestrial solutions,” he said. “Our intention is not to build networks and then operate them ourselves, but rather to quickly advance the state of these technologies to the point that they become viable solutions for operators and other partners to deploy.

Facebook also announced its laser communications team had designed and lab tested a laser with the capability to deliver internet speeds of 10Gb/s, “approximately 10x faster than the previous state-of-the-art in the industry – to a target the size of a dime more than 10 miles away”.

Once completed, the laser system will be used to connect to its other drones, and to the ground, and eventually crate a stratospheric network that can “extend to even the remotest regions of the world”, added Parikh.