Facebook is working on bringing better Internet connectivity to the world in three major ways, and one of them is aiming to bring faster and more reliable connections to urban areas.
Called Terragraph, the system is an antenna-based Wi-Fi delivery system designed for urban connectivity. It was announced at Facebook’s F8 developers conference Wednesday.
Terragraph can outfit street lights, traffic signals and other city infrastructure with antennas capable of delivering transmission rates up to 7Gbps (gigabits per second) via the WiGig standard — much faster than today’s 4G/LTE mobile connections.
While these speeds are impressive, they don’t reach very far. By using the WiGig standard, Terragraph uses a 60GHz frequency to deliver connectivity, which has a difficult time getting through things like walls and water. But since, in a city, the poles and other infrastructure would be close together, range won’t be such a big issue.
Terragraph is coming in tandem with Project Aries, which stands for Antenna Radio Integration for Efficiency in Spectrum, which covers larger, unconnected areas using a structure of 96 antennas.
Facebook is also working on a solar-powered, Internet-beaming drone called Aquila, which can connect very remote areas that don’t have any Internet access at all.