At the official opening of Facebook’s swanky new expanded office in Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday, the company revealed that it will be pilot testing its Terragraph wireless technology in Cyberjaya this year.
Connectivity is one of three tenets of Facebook’s “Fast Forward Together” strategic long-term initiative to help drive the nation’s digital economic development path.
In line with the Government’s efforts to make broadband connectivity accessible to all, Facebook believes that people deserve a consistent, high bandwidth internet experience.
Terragraph is a wireless technology designed to deliver cost-effective, reliable, high-speed internet access in urban and suburban environments. By using street-level mmWave radios, Terragraph leverages existing street furniture to create a wireless distribution (mesh) network, suited for last-mile access.
Unlike cellular wireless access like 3G and 4G, Terragraph leverages V-band spectrum lower frequencies (60GHz) that enables multi-Gbps fibre-like speed.
It’s cheaper, quicker to deploy compared to fibre infrastructure and is also high-scalable—a provider can simply add more nodes on buildings or street lamps to meet demand.
A Terragraph mesh network allows for redundancy and ensures reliability by automatically rerouting when disruptions are detected.
Facebook first deployed Terragraph technology at its Menlo Park headquarters in California. The city of San Jose is partnering Facebook to test the technology in its downtown corridor.
The company is also launching a field test together with Deutshe Telekom’s Hungarian subsidiary Magyar Telekom in the Budapest area.
Last year, it launched a trial with Indonesian mobile operator XL Axiata.
In March, Facebook launched a Terragraph pilot in Georgetown, Penang in partnership with YTL Communications (“Yes”). Malaysia is the second country in the world to run large scale Terragraph trials after Hungary.
Georgetown, a UNESCO status city, has legacy infrastructure that makes it difficult to deploy fibre. Terragraph makes it easy and inexpensive to provide high-speed broadband access.
The Terragraph network in Penang consists of 400 nodes installed throughout the UNESCO heritage zone, connecting 100 businesses with fibre-broadband-likes speeds. The network also includes 50 public Wi-Fi locations, which so far has been enjoyed by 10,000 users.
During the launch on 18 February, YTL Communications demonstrated downloads speeds in access of 1.3Gbps and upload speeds of up to 1.7Gbps with latency of 13ms.
In collaboration with a yet-to-be-revealed local service provider, Facebook will roll-out Terragraph trials in Cyberjaya later this year. The collaboration will include the provision of Wi-Fi, fixed wireless access and smart city applications and services.
To learn more about Terragraph, visit https://terragraph.com/#terragraph.
