Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Facebook is bringing citywide wireless internet to San Jose

San Jose is a pilot city for one of Facebook's moonshot projects called Terragraph. The goal is to blanket an urban area with gigabit internet using ultra high frequency WiFi. While most WiFi networks run at 2.4 or 5 GHz, Facebook is creating a wireless backbone at 60 GHz. This means very high speeds, but the signal cannot go through walls. The plan is to hang high-speed routers on streetlights and the sides of buildings pretty much everywhere, and then connect them to standard networking gear to get the bandwidth inside of each building. The routers would also broadcast traditional WiFi signals, which might even eliminate the need to use a cellular network in an urban area like Downtown.

There is no formal ETA on when the network will be complete, but the routers should start going up very soon.

Source: SVBJ


4 comments:

  1. There is already free wifi in DTSJ, right? Anyone know how this will differ and if it will actually come to fruition unlike Google Fiber?

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    Replies
    1. There is but it is pretty slow and inconsistent (I ended up disabling the network and using LTE instead). This should be at least ten times faster and have better coverage.

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  2. The existing wireless internet in DTSJ is absolutely worthless. So this initiative can hardly help but improve things.

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  3. Yawn, Ricochet did this over 20 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service)

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