Signals Research Group assesses Facebook's Terragraph internet initiative

Facebook’s desire to connect more people to the internet is well known. Signals Research Group (SRG) published a report assessing how the company's Terragraph initiative performs outside of trial situations. Terragraph is a fixed wireless access platform that uses 60 GHz spectrum. It’s unlicensed, so other applications can use the spectrum, creating interference concerns. It’s also high enough to fall into the millimeter-wave camp, where coverage is limited and performance is degraded in non-line-of-sight conditions. On the other hand, 60 GHz is ideal in many respects because it provides ample bandwidth, and there’s a lot of it. Emil Olbrich, Vice President of Networks at SRG, said he was especially impressed by the work done in the Layer 2 and Layer 3 routing as well as Terragraph's ability to mitigate interference. “Their latency was extremely good," said Olbrich. "Their frame loss was negligible, and jitter wasn’t that much. It met all the requirements of 1564.” So if someone says it’s “fiber-like,” they have some real substance to back that up. If you’re a municipality in the US, for example, that doesn’t want to spend money on spectrum and just wants connectivity, “this is a great way to do that so you don’t have to dig up a street and put fiber in there,” he said.