Facebook and Qualcomm partner to develop high-speed Terragraph WiFi for cities, will begin field trials in 2019 using 60GHz technology from Qualcomm
Facebook's plan to connect neighborhoods and businesses wirelessly, known as Terragraph, will begin field trials in 2019 using 60GHz technology …
Context & Ripple Effects
Terragraph has been on Facebook's roadmap since it unveiled the system alongside rural-focused Project ARIES in April 2016, building on earlier millimeter-wave networking work under Internet.org. The Qualcomm partnership is the step that turns a research platform into shippable hardware: 60GHz silicon from a volume chipmaker, with city field trials slated for 2019.
The move also fits the open-infrastructure playbook Facebook laid out when it launched the Telecom Infra Project with Intel, Nokia and major carriers in 2016 — seed specs and reference designs rather than sell networks. By August 2018 the same strategy was running at street level through Express Wi-Fi's large-scale mesh pilot in Tanzania, and by early 2019 Terragraph itself was part of an expansion into Peru, Nigeria, South Africa and California.
First-order effects
- Qualcomm gains a non-handset design win for its 60GHz technology at a moment when its Apple-related revenue is declining faster than expected, giving investors a diversification data point beyond automotive deals like the BMW cockpit agreement.
- Facebook shifts Terragraph from internal development to externally validated trials, with Qualcomm's chips de-risking the hardware path for the 2019 city deployments.
Second-order effects
- Cities and operators evaluating dense urban backhaul get a fiber-alternative built on merchant silicon, pressuring incumbent equipment vendors — including TIP members like Nokia — to match open, multi-vendor 60GHz designs.
- Express Wi-Fi's access-layer mesh work and Terragraph's backhaul layer begin to converge into a stackable offering for the same emerging-market and underserved-urban geographies Facebook is already expanding into.
Third-order effects
- If the trial-to-deployment pattern holds, urban last-mile infrastructure increasingly gets specified by platform companies publishing open designs, with carriers adopting rather than originating the technology — a structural inversion of how telecom networks were traditionally built.
- Chipmakers facing handset-cycle volatility gain a template for monetizing millimeter-wave portfolios across fixed wireless access, reinforcing the case for 60GHz as shared infrastructure rather than a niche point-to-point link.
The trend: Connectivity infrastructure is shifting from carrier-led R&D toward platform companies publishing open hardware designs with merchant-silicon partners, with Facebook's Terragraph-and-Express-Wi-Fi stack as the leading test case.