Terragraph is the name of the new miracle technology developed by Facebook as a disruptive solution for broadband expansion. Data volume (IP traffic) is set to triple over the next five years. The bottleneck for gigabit connectivity is all too often the residential connection. In many regions, especially in rural areas, there is a lack of sufficiently dimensioned backbone networks.
With Terragraph, Facebook has developed a technical and highly economical solution that, to a certain extent, aggressively challenges the fiber-optic paradigm in broadband expansion, especially in the area of residential connections. The technical core of this innovation is a so-called mesh network based on millimeter-wave technology. The units, which can be mounted on house walls or street lamps, connect automatically, allowing entire residential areas or streets to be brought into the gigabit age in just a few weeks.
For the end user, there is no difference in usage. Instead of using light as the medium for data transport, the physical laws of millimeter waves are utilized. All data—whether streaming, voice, or other IP-based transfers—is identical in terms of utility. From a purely physical standpoint, radio waves are actually faster than light.
The mesh networks are, of course, connected to the main backbone via fiber optics. The disruptive effect is felt primarily at the access layer and in the micro-backbone within streets or residential areas—wherever data volumes aggregate, they are connected to the necessary fiber backbone at that point.
The biggest advantages are the speed of deployment and the resulting ability to provide private households and businesses with rapid access. Deployment takes only a few weeks, compared to the years it can sometimes take for fiber-optic installation.
COMPART was the first specialist company for wireless data networks to develop and test Terragraph technology—and yes, it is as exciting as Facebook describes it. The speed of deployment is incredible, and the costs are almost unbelievably low. Furthermore, the quality of the networks is extremely high, with up to 99.995% availability thanks to mesh technology.
In addition to the extremely accelerated expansion, the costs are in a completely different league. Overall, the costs per home connection, including neighborhood networking (micro-backbone), will be below €1,000.
With a typical budget for FTTH-level broadband expansion of €10 million for sometimes only a few hundred users, the use of Terragraph technology could provide gigabit access to approximately 10,000 users.
Highly innovative technologies are always viewed with suspicion at first—what is the best way to squander the opportunities? By testing this incredible technical solution.
The technology approach developed by Facebook and Intel was created to meet the growing demand for high-speed internet access in urban and suburban environments. It offers a genuine alternative to last-mile fiber-optic networking and provides data transmission in the gigabit range.
Terragraph technology offers fiber-like connectivity, but at a significantly lower cost and can be implemented in just a few weeks.
Global IP traffic is estimated to triple over the next five years, and the number of devices connected to the internet is expected to double in the same period.
In addition to last-mile broadband fixed internet access, Terragraph is also suitable as backhaul for Wi-Fi access points or for connecting small cells and micro cells to 4G and 5G mobile networks. This enormous demand for bandwidth represents both a challenge and an opportunity for communication service providers.
Discover how Terragraph technology works:
More affordable than fiber optics, Facebook's Terragraph technology is designed to provide cost-effective broadband access to previously underserved areas—point-to-point, multipoint, or in a mesh network:
On the wireless radio interface and at layers one and two of the ISO/OSI reference model, Terragraph is based on the already specified WiGig standards 802.11ad and 802.11ay.
Unlike conventional Wi-Fi standards such as 802.11ac or 802.11ax, Terragraph does not operate in the unlicensed 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz bands, but in the also unlicensed 60 GHz band. The 60 GHz range offers high bandwidth, but its reach is limited due to the high frequencies and short wavelengths in the millimeter range. Short-wave radio signals struggle to penetrate walls and objects, which is why ranges of only a few meters can be achieved inside buildings. Outdoors, oxygen and humidity in the air attenuate the 60 GHz radio signals. By using MIMO multi-antenna technology and bundled, directional transmission, distances of up to 250 meters can be bridged outdoors.
However, the shorter range of the 60 GHz band also has the advantage that there is hardly any interference with neighboring radio stations. Terragraph is used outdoors in urban environments and uses multi-antenna arrays that enable directional signals to the next radio station in the mesh.
The network nodes operate with IPv6 and are organized as a mesh in a Software-Defined Network (SDN). A newly developed modular Layer 3 routing protocol ensures intelligent, fault-redundant data forwarding between the meshed nodes. Various topologies and connection options such as point-to-point, point-to-multipoint, and mesh are supported. At the MAC layer, the TDD/TDMA MAC protocol eliminates some of the weaknesses of transmitting TCP/IP-based protocols over Wi-Fi connections. TDD/TDMA MAC ensures more predictable performance for TCP/IP data traffic.
To provide the indoor area with high-speed internet, a Terragraph node installed on the outside of a building can be connected to the building and the WLAN access point integrated into the LAN.
Terragraph offers numerous advantages, and this technology has the potential to represent a fundamental paradigm shift in broadband expansion. It may be able to replace expensive and time-consuming fiber-optic cabling for the last mile.
Using public Wi-Fi in city centers or at tourist spots has become a common service for consumers. Services of this kind will become increasingly common in the future. This could include mission-critical services for autonomous driving, the digitalization of the healthcare industry, or traffic management.
Many services that we are not even aware of today will be the future.
Every type of digital service must be transported economically and securely over an infrastructure.
An ideal infrastructure for this is municipal street lighting, which currently operates as a cost center primarily to illuminate sidewalks and roads.
Street lighting offers significant advantages for wireless-based solutions:
Using public Wi-Fi in city centers or at tourist spots has become a common service for consumers. Services of this kind will become increasingly common in the future. This could include mission-critical services for autonomous driving, the digitalization of the healthcare industry, or traffic management.
Many services that we are not even aware of today will be the future.
Every type of digital service must be transported economically and securely over an infrastructure.
An ideal infrastructure for this is municipal street lighting, which currently operates as a cost center primarily to illuminate sidewalks and roads.
Street lighting offers significant advantages for wireless-based solutions:
In Lünen, Compart is working with several partners to develop an innovative data network solution for Smart City applications. By leveraging street lighting infrastructure, numerous wireless solutions are combined to provide the necessary data highways for every conceivable application. The range of this network structure extends from simple public Wi-Fi access and mmWave solutions to the 5G standard.
This data networking infrastructure must meet the highest demands for reliability, data security, ease of use, and, above all, very high implementation speed and cost-effective operation.
In the real-world laboratory in Lünen, Compart is expanding its solution portfolio with the Terragraph microwave technology developed by Intel and Facebook. This technological approach gained significant global attention when it launched about two years ago. It enables extremely fast, high-performance, and economical expansion based on an automatic mesh network, delivering data throughput of up to 15 Gbit/s in the license-free 60 GHz frequency spectrum.
Cambium's Terragraph solution differs in many respects from previously known wireless systems thanks to the new ay-chip and the IPv6 standard.
The technology is based on the 802.11ay solution, which ensures numerous advantages, such as consistently high spectrum efficiency even during congestion, high interference resistance, low latency, and a high degree of automation.
Following the launch, Facebook and Intel sought and found manufacturing partners on the global market responsible for the mass production of this innovative technology.
Cambium is one of the few companies licensed for Terragraph. Compart benefits from an intensive, long-standing partnership with Cambium.
Compart is the first leading specialist for wireless networks in Europe to have tested this technology in its own lab and prepared it for deployment.
Since the lab tests at Compart were successfully completed, the project will move to a real-world laboratory in March.
If the findings from the development labs hold true, this technology represents a fundamental paradigm shift in broadband expansion, which to date in Germany has been based almost exclusively on fiber-optic networks. The experience of very slow and extremely expensive expansion is ubiquitous and is particularly noticeable in the suboptimal household coverage for homeschooling in many places.
Based on current experience, expansion times—and thus access for private households, as well as broadband connections for companies and public sector organizations—can be drastically reduced to just a few weeks, while costs can be massively lowered.
