In a move that should draw the attention of incumbent ISPs and mobile service providers, Facebook, said its Connectivity Lab is pushing ahead with a plan to use emerging millimeter wave technology to drive speedy wireless broadband services to dense urban areas.
That system, called “Terragraph,” is being billed as a 60 GHz, multi-node system that will use off-the-shelf components and tap into the proverbial cloud “for intensive data processing,” Facebook described here. Terragraph, Facebook said, will use radios that are based on WiGig, an enhancement to the WiFi standard for in-room, high-bandwidth communications.
“Combined with Wi-Fi access points, Terragraph is one of the lowest cost solutions to achieve 100 percent street-level coverage of gigabit Wi-Fi,” Facebook claimed.
Facebook is testing it at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters and expects to expand to a broader trial in San Jose later this year, Facebook engineering VP Jay Parikh said at the company’s F8 developers conference, according to DSL Reports.
