Facebook Teams Up with Qualcomm To Offer High-Speed Wi-Fi

• Facebook and Qualcomm have teamed up for the tech giant’s gigabit Wi-Fi internet project that will enable routers to become more efficient.
• The project titled “Terragraph” has been in the works since 2016 and was announced at F8 conference of that year.
• The project seeks to connect dense urban areas with high-speed internet connectivity.

Facebook has partnered with Qualcomm as part of its Terragraph project. The Terragraph project was first announced in 2016 to offer rural areas access to high-speed internet. The Wi-Fi connectivity project is meant to send signals through routers as efficiently as possible at high speeds.

The F8 annual developer conference of 2016 highlighted the project as a multi-node wireless system which has the ability to connect even the most remote areas to the internet. The project has been in development ever since, and Qualcomm becoming part of the project will enable the chipset maker to manufacture high-quality routers that can transmit data at a 60GHz frequency, which can enable high-speed broadband connections. With the help of powerful routers to carry over signals across large areas, the project can reach areas where internet connectivity can be erratic.

Image Courtesy of The Verge

The field tests for the project are to go live from next year with Qualcomm set to be in charge of testing the new technology. There is no official word on how long until the Terragraph project will go live on Facebook and information about the project has been kept under wraps by the social media giant. The project can be a success at an international scale, especially in countries that do not have access to the fast and stable internet.

Qualcomm is also set to bring out 5G enabled chipsets for mobile devices and carriers according to a company spokesperson. The chipset manufacturer has already signed up with early access partners who will get access to the technology first. The carriers and partners have not been revealed yet, but it is likely that Samsung could be one of the first adopters of 5G technology going by previous partnerships with Qualcomm. The chipset samples should be available by next year, which means we are at least a couple years away from seeing 5G technology being adopted at the consumer level for users.