Last week at the annual F8 Facebook fest in San Francisco, the company unveiled two different wireless antennas its engineers had secretly created inside its Connectivity Lab, a swashbuckling effort to expand the reach of the Internet in so many new ways. One of these antennas, dubbed ARIES, is designed to beam signals to rural areas from cities up to two dozen miles away. According to Facebook's data, about 97 percent of the world's population lives within that radius, which would, in theory, allow ARIES to connect a majority of the people on Earth who are now unconnected—and make sure they have the infrastructure they need to, well, use Facebook. Such antennas, Facebook says, are much cheaper than stretching fiber and power cables and so many tiny cell towers into those rural areas to deliver broadband the old-fashioned way. 

At first blush, Facebook's aggressive efforts to create networking hardware may seem odd for a company that's all about social networking. But it doesn't want to sell hardware. Facebook company merely designs hardware to feed the growth of Facebook the social network. And it hopes to drive that growth by giving away the designs—for free.