Facebook building high-speed wireless data links for global connectivity
Culture
Can't forget the people who are unconnected.
Almost 3.8 billion people still aren't with internet access.
And then having connectivity really boils down to solving a couple of key problems.
We need to actually have access, we need to make it affordable, we need to increase awareness.
And so we've been working on a portfolio of technological and operational solutions to make this happen.
Over the last ten years, we've been busy building our own infrastructures, state of the art data centers all over the world and a big focus of this has been building fast and cheap networks to connect all of these things around the world.
So we've been taking the technological and operational expertise we build up here.
And working with partners all around the world to help get people connected.
We work with Airtel and PCS in Uganda to connect almost 3 million people using a new fiber back call system that's just finished late last year.
We're also working with Telephonica.
In Peru and the Highlands and the Amazonian rainforest in a similar project there.
We're also investing in wireless technology to dramatically reduce the cost of deploying this fiber back hall.
This is where AI, once again, can be a game changer.
What used to be a process for deploying point to point rally systems that look like this.
Which is a worker in a truck using a periscope to make sure there's a clear line sight between two poles.
Now looks a little bit more like this.
Using computer vision, to plot out what's going on in the city streets and find the best nodes in the graph in order to place this devices.
To help us build a network graph at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time now right now centers A and Facebook employees are testing out a Wi-Fi base system that uses this high bandwidth wireless back hold sixty gigahertz point to point much cheaper than length cable throughout the wide city and trials like this will be running in hungry and Kuala Lumpur soon.
[APPLAUSE]
Like our work in AI, we think we need to do this together with industry, not alone.
That's why we're working with literally hundreds of partners across the industry in the telecomm infrastructure project, to make sure that we can get this technology to people as quickly as we can.
