Facebook and Qualcomm partner to develop high-speed Terragraph WiFi for cities, will begin field trials in 2019 using 60GHz technology from Qualcomm
Mark Hachman / PCWorld :
Context & Ripple Effects
Terragraph has been a slow burn since Facebook unveiled it in 2016 alongside Project ARIES as a terrestrial answer to urban congestion, built on the millimeter-wave research it had already been running for Internet.org. The missing piece was silicon: turning a lab-scale 60GHz design into something cities could actually deploy required a chip partner.
First-order effects
- Qualcomm gains a non-handset design win for its 60GHz technology at a moment when its handset-dependent revenue is under pressure, while Facebook gets a credible path from prototype to deployable hardware for the 2019 field trials.
Second-order effects
- If the trials validate fiber-class speeds without trenching, Terragraph becomes an alternative backhaul layer that carriers and city IT buyers can weigh against fiber builds — and it slots into Facebook's broader connectivity stack alongside the Tanzania large-scale Wi-Fi mesh pilot under Express Wi-Fi.
Third-order effects
- The partnership extends the playbook Facebook set up with the Telecom Infra Project: hyperscalers supplying reference designs and chip partnerships so dense urban wireless is deployed on open, standardized hardware rather than carrier-proprietary equipment — a structure later reflected in Terragraph's expansion to Peru, Nigeria, South Africa, and California.
The trend: Connectivity infrastructure is shifting from carrier-owned R&D toward hyperscaler-led platforms that pair open specifications with merchant-silicon partners like Qualcomm.