Facebook Connectivity Lab announced a record-setting successful test of its millimeter wave technology for providing high-speed data over long distances.
Facebook said in an email to SocialTimes that a test at its Southern California lab successfully beamed data at a rate of nearly 20 gigabits per second from a mountaintop in Malibu to a rooftop in Woodland Hills, 13 kilometers (eight miles) away.
The social network added that it used just 105 watts of power, roughly equivalent to what a single light bulb consumes, to provide enough data to stream nearly 1,000 ultra-high-definition videos simultaneously.
The next step" Facebook said it will start testing a link between the air and the ground using a modified Cessna airplane, with the ultimate goal of mounting the system on its Aquila solar-powered aircraft. Abhishek Tiwari, who works on radio frequency and MMW products for Facebook Connectivity Lab, said in a blog post last week:
In recent years, the MMW portion of the radio frequency spectrum has emerged as a viable option for supporting such high-capacity links, and there have been many advances in MMW component technology. Still, many technical and environmental challenges remain at the system level. A group of Connectivity Lab researchers and engineers are working to address them with next-generation MMW point-to-point links.
The technology we tested is applicable to a number of Connectivity Lab?s solutions. For example, it could be used as a terrestrial backha...