Introducing Facebook's new terrestrial connectivity systems — Terragraph and Project ARIES
Facebook believes that people — no matter where they live — deserve a consistent, high-bandwidth internet experience. While access to high-speed internet varies across the globe, both developing and developed economies can suffer from insufficient data rates. Slow internet speed is especially prevalent in developing economies where mobile networks are often unable to achieve data rates better than 2G. Developed economies are hampered by Wi-Fi and LTE infrastructure that is unable to keep up with the exponential growth in the consumption of photos and video at higher and higher resolutions. While solutions such as GPON optical fiber can provide 100s of megabits up to several gigabits of capacity, the high costs associated with laying the fiber makes the goal of ubiquitous gigabit citywide coverage unachievable and unaffordable for almost all countries. Similarly, conventional means of increasing the capacity of wireless networks, such as licensing more radio frequency spectrum or in...
