MWC 2022: Facebook Continues Its Quest for Global Connectivity
Facebook's "connecting the globe" mantra plays out in all sorts of ways, from edifice an AI-backed global customs to bringing remote internet admission and telecommunication infrastructure to remote areas of the world by land, past sea, and even by drone.
At Mobile Globe Congress, the social tech giant announced its latest initiative in Africa, forth with updates to the Telecom Infra Projection (TIP) and the company'due south growing open-source telecommunications technology stack.
Jay Parikh, Facebook'due south head of applied science and infrastructure, gave some insight into the company'southward latest developments on the connectivity front during a press Q&A at the show. Facebook launched a new projection partnering with telecom operators Airtel Uganda and Bandwidth & Cloud Services Grouping (BCS) to build a 448-mile fiber to provide backhaul connectivity covering more than three million people in Uganda, and enable future cross-border connectivity to neighboring countries.
Parikh said the attempt is a learning experience in working with local telcos to design, programme, and build out infrastructure for backhaul network capacity. Facebook plans to offering open up access and a shared infrastructure framework to encourage greater local participation, and once completed, Parikh said the new infrastructure will reduce costs and increase chapters, improving operation and supporting upgrades to 3G and 4G in areas where operators are bandwidth-constrained.
Depending on the region, each of these projects will leverage a different combination of Facebook'due south adjacent-gen connectivity stack: the Terragraph, ARIES, and Aquila wireless systems, as well equally its customizable open-source OpenCellular and Voyager hardware.
"It's really difficult to go connectivity upgraded for people who aren't connected. The cost of bringing the infrastructure to them is exorbitantly high, and to build it out in the conventional way takes a lot of time, money, and coordination," explained Parikh.
"We have a technology called Terragraph, which is a loftier-speed wireless organization for urban environments. The idea is to use a low-toll radio operating at the 60GHz range to build out a high-capacity, low-cost network," said Parikh. "Aries helps extend the net out from urban environments to communities 10 or 20 or 30km exterior the city. Think of it as a very advanced base station that extends connectivity out from urban to rural areas. Then we accept an aeriform platform—Aquila UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle], which invests in millimeter wave engineering science and costless space optics to bring net admission to people l or lxx or 100km outside the city."
Facebook's arroyo with all these overlapping connectivity systems is to figure out how to packet them in whatever given state of affairs depending on what a region needs to connect to the net.
On the Voyager and OpenCellular front, other TIP members are increasing capacity and extending the capabilities of Facebook'south open hardware. European carrier Orangish announced at MWC that it is trialing Voyager over its optical transport network, optical networking provider ADVA is deploying Voyager at scale, and San Jose, California-based service provider Cavium has bolstered OpenCellular for 4G and LTE speeds.
"OpenCellular is a white box optical transponder and routing solution for telcos to deploy a more efficient optical network and extend cobweb networks out from urban environments; it'south a one-size-fits-all box with an open up ecosystem. Nosotros only built it for 2G and so it could exist deployed for basic connectivity in rural areas," said Parikh. "We contributed OpenCellular to TIP terminal year, and now Cavium has taken OpenCellular and adapted the stack to offer 4G and LTE."
The TIP has grown from five founding members in 2022 to 450 members today, and Parikh too appear that Facebook and Britain carrier BT are launching another TIP Ecosystem Dispatch Center Program in London (there's already one in South korea) to fund and incubate telco startups. A London grouping of venture capital companies has pledged to invest $170 million in the new accelerator'southward telecom infrastructure startups.
Finally, Parikh did comment on the SpaceX Falcon ix rocket explosion this past September, which besides destroyed a Facebook satellite intended to bring internet access to Africa. Bringing it back to the connectivity stack, Parikh said Facebook is experimenting with both UAV and satellite-based solutions to bring net admission to the world'southward most isolated areas.
"We're plainly bummed about the mishap with SpaceX. We proceed to look into what the options are for us, simply satellites are part of our overall strategy," said Parikh. "For very rural communities, satellite communication still makes the virtually sense in terms of reaching people the fastest, but UAVs give y'all more bandwidth than satellites. The [Aquila] UAV platform and the satellites are complementary; in the virtually rural parts of the globe, it won't necessarily be one or the other."
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