A potential rival to Starlink plans on using high-altitude planes, rather than orbiting satellites, to beam broadband to communities in need of high-speed internet.

Airbus subsidiary AALTO HAPS is working on a solar-powered, unmanned drone called the Zephyr that's designed to stay in the air for weeks or months at a time.

It will essentially hover in the stratosphere, an area about 20 to 50 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, where weather balloons usually travel. In an interview with Bloomberg, AALTO CEO Samer Halawi said his company is developing Zephyr to be capable of “spending as many as 200 days in flight,” where it can act as a cell tower in the sky.

UK-based AALTO is targeting Kenya for its first operations with the goal of serving customers during Q3 2024. The company is also aiming to build 50 to 75 Zephyrs per year.

There’s no word on pricing. But AALTO is promising it’ll be able to beam 4G/5G mobile connectivity to standard smartphones without requiring consumers to buy any additional hardware. Currently, 5G speeds usually hit around 100 to 200Mbps for downloads.

“Zephyr has a coverage of 7,500 square kilometers, which is the equivalent of up to 250 towers on the ground,” the company says on its website. The latency is also expected to reach under 10 milliseconds. In contrast, Starlink’s latency can average around 50ms in the US.

The high-altitude drones from AALTO are also designed to be significantly less expensive to operate than satellite internet systems. But it remains to be seen if the technology works at scale when SpaceX's Starlink system is already serving over 2 million customers.

Once AALTO launches, it could immediately face some competition from Starlink, which is already available in Kenya, along with Nigeria, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Zambia. SpaceX is also aiming to expand Starlink to much of the African continent next year.

In addition, SpaceX is planning to launch its own cellular Starlink service for smartphones next year, pending approval from the FCC.