Last month, social networking giant, Facebook, announced a new terrestrial connectivity system named Terragraph and Project ARIES. The company believes that no matter where people are in the world, they deserve a premium internet experience, and this new project will assist communities that experience slow internet speeds and perhaps even some places that are devoid of the internet altogether.
Facebook also didn’t mince their words when throwing the laying of fiber, and technologies like LTE infrastructure under the bus. The company said in a statement: “…the high costs associated with laying the fiber makes the goal of ubiquitous gigabit citywide coverage unachievable and unaffordable for almost all countries.”
Therefore, Facebook put their Connectivity Lab to work. The result was Terragraph, a 60 GHZ multi-node, wireless system for supplying the internet to urban areas.
Although 60GHZ has traditionally been avoided due to its high absorption of oxygen and water, countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, China, South Korea, Japan and others saw the benefit of making this part of the spectrum.
– Facebook Terragraph statement
To see how the technology works, look at the video of the physical components that Facebook would be using to connect urban areas to the internet below:
A month later, the software engineers working with the hardware that will be capable of giving full urban areas internet coverage, have released software to modulate a distributed network application platform for the Terragraph project. The software’s name is Open/R, and you can read the intricate details of how the software engineers developed the software: HERE.