Facebook has presented the projects in which he is currently working to take the Internet to areas of the world where the fiber does not arrive, with projects that include underwater cables, an installer robot that moves through the electricity lines and a wireless system that takes advantage of the furniture Urban to offer high speed.
More than 3,000 million people are currently accessing Internet access. The company, through Facebook Connectivity, has already taken reliable and high-speed Internet to more than 300 million people, and plans to take it to another billion people in the next decade.
For this, it has been working in different projects for several years that include the development of solutions to take the high-speed Internet through the sea, land and air, as explained at a press conference.
The underwater cables are the global Internet spine. Facebook Connectivity has worked in the improvement of fiber cables, and has presented a transatlantic submarine wiring system with 24 fiber pairs that will connect Europe and the United States.
Until recently, the transoceanic submarine cables included two to eight pairs of fiber. The new wiring system has a Petabit medium capacity per second, that is, half a million gigabits. Which means that it multiplies the ability of the transatlantic cables from the beginning of the century.
The company has also explained that in some sections of Project 2Africa, which will connect Africa, Asia and Europe and will offer connectivity to 3,000 million people.
A work that will affect Spain that, according to the plans that the company has shared, will be the node from which it raises an underwater cable that will also go through France and Italy to reach the Suez Canal.
For this, according to the company, a new aluminum conductive system will be used that will replace traditional copper drivers, which will reduce the construction costs of a cable as extensive like this.
On the other hand, the ability of the underwater cables depends on the amount of energy that can be delivered from the shore to a series of repeaters, which arranged consecutively along the cable - hit 80km away, approximately, which drive The signal in all this trajectory.
In a submarine cable that a Europe and the United States over 7,000 kilometers would take a very long electric cable. To solve this problem, the company's engineers have designed floating beacons that can distribute electricity to repeaters from the ocean.
This initiative is complemented by other solutions that combine the action of Undimotriz Energy Converters (from the waves) and solar panels, which will allow to pass from medium to five Petabits per second (ten times more capacity).
And to evaluate the best disposition of the underwater cables, the company has developed a predictive modeling tool, Atlantis, which helps to foresee where the submarine cable routes should be built to ensure network availability if unexpected events occur, such as earthquakes.
Current methods of installation of fiber on land do not reach everywhere, in part at its high cost. As explained from Facebook, the manufacture of a fiber filament meter costs a cents, but its installation can range between tens and hundreds of euros.
To reduce the installation costs, the company has Developed Bomyx, a robot that moves through the power supply lines to which the fiber cable adds, thus avoiding having to dig and unfold the fiber underground.
This robot currently weighs about 4.5 kilograms, can cross a power line in four minutes and its stabilization mechanism allows you to upload in vertical by these lines. And in order to overcome obstacles with autonomy, for example, posts that hold electrical cables, Bomyx uses advanced movement techniques that allow it to turn around and balance while exceeding obstacles and rolling the fiber on power lines.
Next to Bomyx, the company has also improved fiber cables, mainly to reduce their weight when rolling on the power line, as well as their resistance to high temperatures, as they explain, the medium voltage cables are heated a lot .
The company has used a braided Kevlar fiber cable, which is stronger and reduced dimensions, and maintains flexibility. It has also reduced the fiber pairs, from 96 to 24-a single pair can cover up to a thousand households - and employed materials resistant to high temperatures and damage derived from the formation of electric arches of high voltage lines.
Facebook Connectivity has developed Terragraph technology, a system that uses transmitters installed on rooftops and urban furniture (such as streetlights or traffic lights) to create a distributed network of reliable and high-speed connectivity in homes and companies, which has already been deployed in Anchorage (Alaska) and Perth (Australia).
This system offers speeds similar to those of fiber without the need for cables. The company indicates that its installation is faster than that of the braided fiber, because it uses the points where the fiber already exists and expands its capacity wirelessly, through nodes installed in the existing urban furniture.
The company began working in Terragraph in 2015, by the hand of a partner ecosystem composed of manufacturers (OEM) and service providers around the world. To date, these OEMs have sent more than 30,000 units from Terragraph to more than one hundred service providers and systems integrators around the world.
Date Of Update: 09 October 2021, 14:07
